The most impressive person I’ve met this year has no Instagram. I know, because I looked. Twice. Standing in a parking lot, like a detective with no case.

Nothing. No handle, no LinkedIn, no digital residue. The closest thing to an online presence was a company website with a contact form, and I’m fairly sure the form goes nowhere. This person runs more money than everyone I follow combined, and their entire internet strategy is the strategy of a submarine.

Meanwhile, I have three platforms and a posting schedule. We’ll get back to that.

You’ve probably seen the discourse: quiet luxury is dead. Not dying, dead, killed by its own success. The whole point of the beige cashmere thing was that only insiders could read it, and then TikTok published the dictionary. The Row became a hashtag. The Birkin, a bag whose entire personality was scarcity, started showing up in every airport lounge like a Labrador. When everyone can decode the code, it stops being a code and becomes a uniform. Expensive beige is just beige with a receipt.

So status did what status always does when the masses arrive at the party: it left through the back door. And this time it didn’t move to a new brand. It moved off the grid entirely. The 2026 flex is not owning the unbrandable thing. It’s being unreachable. No stories, no updates, no read receipts. The digital equivalent of an unlisted number, except the number is your entire personality.

I wrote a few weeks ago that looking cheap is a latency problem: that half-second delay between other people’s gestures and yours, the micro-hesitation that tells the room you had to learn what they inherited. Real luxury is zero latency. You never needed to learn, so you never need to check.

Well, here’s chapter two, and the plot twist is that the arrow flips. In a dining room, luxury is zero latency. In your inbox, luxury is maximum latency. The most expensive sentence in the English language is currently “sorry, just seeing this”, sent eleven days later, with no further explanation. No apology tour, no “crazy week!”. Just the serene confidence of someone whose life happens elsewhere.

Because think about what instant availability actually signals. If you reply in four minutes, at 11pm, on a Sunday, you are announcing that nothing in your physical life outranks a notification. Your evening was interruptible. You were, in the fullest sense of the word, on call. And “on call” is not a lifestyle. It’s a job description, historically not the best-paid one.

Run the hierarchy in your head.

• The intern replies instantly.

• The manager replies today.

• The director replies this week.

• The owner doesn’t reply; someone replies on his behalf, opening with “he saw your message and smiled”.

  Response time is an org chart. The further you are from survival, the longer you can let a message age, like wine,
  or like my apologies.

Here’s where I should confess my credentials, or lack thereof. I run a design studio. My clients are in crypto, which means they live on Telegram, and Telegram is not an app, it’s a weather system. It never closes, it never sleeps, and it has strong opinions at 2am. My response latency is measured in minutes because my invoices are measured in retainers. I am, professionally speaking, extremely reachable. Ask my phone: it knows my face better than my mother does, and it sees it more often too.

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And I live in Dubai, which makes the whole thing funnier, because Dubai is the world capital of the old flex. This is a city where the license plate costs more than the car and the car already cost too much. Watching Dubai attempt the unreachable aesthetic will be like watching a peacock attempt minimalism. I’ve never been more excited for a cultural transition in my life.

Being offline is only a flex if your absence is expensive. That’s the whole trick. The unreachable rich aren’t actually unreachable: they’ve outsourced reachability. There’s an assistant reading the messages, a manager taking the calls, a lawyer answering the emails. Their offline is staffed. It’s not silence, it’s a switchboard with better furniture. The aura of mystery has a payroll.

For everyone else, unreachability has a different name. It’s called missing the shift, losing the client, “we went with someone more responsive”. The gig worker can’t leave anything on read: the algorithm is watching, and the algorithm doesn’t smile at your message. Availability runs on a strict gradient: the less leverage you have, the faster you type. Somewhere right now a delivery rider has 30 seconds to accept a ping, and a billionaire has let a message from a head of state marinate since March. Same phone. Different planet.

Where I grew up, in Lorraine, everyone was offline. We called it the landline. My mother spent entire afternoons gloriously unreachable, not as a wellness practice but as the default setting of the universe. Nobody called it digital detox. Nobody called it anything. Then being reachable became mandatory, and now being unreachable is being sold back to us as a luxury good. That’s the part I find genuinely elegant, in an evil way: they took the factory setting of my childhood, wrapped it in linen, and priced it like The Row. Silence used to be free. Check again.

So no, I won’t be deleting anything.

I’m a first-generation everything: first-generation business owner, first-generation tax optimizer, first-generation person in my family whose job survives without weather. People like me don’t get to be mysterious yet. Mystery is a second-generation product. You need someone before you to have done the shouting, so you can afford the whispering. My kids can be offline. I’m still in the shouting phase, and honestly, the acoustics are decent.

Which brings us to the most awkward part of this essay: you’re reading it on a platform, where I posted it, hoping the algorithm likes me today. I am writing about the status of silence at a volume of roughly eleven. If being offline is the new flex, this article is me pressing my face against the glass of a restaurant I can’t enter, taking notes on the menu, and charging you nothing for the review.

But that’s always been the deal here. I don’t write from inside the codes. I write from the doorway, half in, half out, close enough to describe the room, far enough to still find it strange. The people who are truly offline will never read this. Their assistant might, though.

Same person, different tax bracket.

La personne la plus impressionnante que j’ai rencontrée cette année n’a pas d’Instagram. Je le sais, j’ai vérifié. Deux fois. Debout sur un parking, comme une détective sans enquête.

Rien. Pas de compte, pas de LinkedIn, aucun résidu numérique. Sa seule présence en ligne, c’est un site d’entreprise avec un formulaire de contact, et je suis à peu près sûre que le formulaire ne mène nulle part. Cette personne gère plus d’argent que tous les gens que je suis réunis, et sa stratégie internet est celle d’un sous-marin.

Moi, pendant ce temps, j’ai trois plateformes et un calendrier de publication. On y reviendra.

Vous avez probablement vu passer le discours : le luxe silencieux est mort. Pas mourant, mort, tué par son propre succès. Tout l’intérêt du cachemire beige, c’était que seuls les initiés savaient le lire, et puis TikTok a publié le dictionnaire. Le Birkin, un sac dont toute la personnalité reposait sur la rareté, s’est mis à apparaître dans tous les salons d’aéroport comme un labrador. Quand tout le monde peut déchiffrer le code, ce n’est plus un code, c’est un uniforme. Le beige cher, c’est juste du beige avec un ticket de caisse.

Alors le statut a fait ce que le statut fait toujours quand les masses débarquent à la fête : il est parti par la porte de derrière. Et cette fois, il n’a pas déménagé vers une nouvelle marque. Il a quitté le réseau. Le flex de 2026, ce n’est pas posséder l’objet sans logo. C’est être injoignable. Pas de stories, pas d’updates, pas d’accusés de lecture. L’équivalent numérique du numéro sur liste rouge, sauf que le numéro, c’est toute votre personnalité.

J’écrivais il y a quelques semaines que faire cheap est un problème de latence : cette demi-seconde de retard entre le geste des autres et le vôtre, cette micro-hésitation qui dit à toute la pièce que vous avez dû apprendre ce qu’eux ont hérité. Le vrai luxe, c’est zéro latence. Vous n’avez jamais eu besoin d’apprendre, donc jamais besoin de vérifier.

Eh bien voici le chapitre deux, et le rebondissement, c’est que la flèche s’inverse. À table, le luxe c’est zéro latence. Dans votre boîte mail, le luxe c’est la latence maximale. La phrase la plus chère de la langue française en ce moment, c’est “désolée, je découvre ton message”, envoyée onze jours plus tard, sans autre explication. Pas de tournée d’excuses, pas de “semaine de fou !”. Juste la sérénité tranquille de quelqu’un dont la vie se passe ailleurs.

Parce que réfléchissez à ce que signale vraiment la disponibilité instantanée. Si vous répondez en quatre minutes, à 23h, un dimanche, vous annoncez que rien dans votre vie physique ne passe avant une notification. Votre soirée était interruptible. Vous étiez, au sens plein du terme, d’astreinte. Et l’astreinte, ce n’est pas un mode de vie. C’est une fiche de poste, historiquement pas la mieux payée.

Déroulez la hiérarchie dans votre tête.

• Le stagiaire répond immédiatement.

• Le manager répond aujourd’hui.

• Le directeur répond cette semaine.

• Le big boss ne répond pas : quelqu’un répond à sa place, en ouvrant par “il a vu votre message et il a souri”.

Le temps de réponse est un organigramme. Plus vous êtes loin de la survie, plus vous pouvez laisser un message vieillir, comme un vin, ou comme mes excuses.

C’est ici que je devrais présenter mes qualifications, ou leur absence. Je dirige un studio de design. Mes clients sont dans la crypto, ce qui veut dire qu’ils vivent sur Telegram, et Telegram n’est pas une application, c’est un système météorologique.
Ça ne ferme jamais, ça ne dort jamais, et ça a des opinions tranchées à 2h du matin. Ma latence de réponse se mesure en minutes parce que mes factures se mesurent en retainers. Je suis, professionnellement parlant, extrêmement joignable. Demandez à mon téléphone : il connaît mon visage mieux que ma mère, et il le voit plus souvent aussi.

Et je vis à Dubaï, ce qui rend le tout encore plus drôle, parce que Dubaï est la capitale mondiale de l’ancien flex. C’est une ville où la plaque d’immatriculation coûte plus cher que la voiture, et la voiture coûtait déjà trop cher. Regarder Dubaï tenter l’esthétique de l’injoignable, ce sera comme regarder un paon tenter le minimalisme. Je n’ai jamais attendu une transition culturelle avec autant d’impatience.

Mais il y a un morceau du discours que je ne peux pas laisser passer, parce qu’une fourchette s’y cache, et vous savez ce que je pense des fourchettes.

Être offline n’est un flex que si votre absence coûte cher. C’est tout le truc. Les riches injoignables ne sont pas vraiment injoignables : ils ont externalisé la joignabilité. Il y a une assistante qui lit les messages, un manager qui prend les appels, un avocat qui répond aux mails. Leur offline est staffé. Ce n’est pas du silence, c’est un standard téléphonique avec de plus beaux meubles. L’aura de mystère a une masse salariale.

Pour tous les autres, l’injoignabilité porte un autre nom. Ça s’appelle rater le shift, perdre le client, “on est partis sur quelqu’un de plus réactif”. Le livreur ne peut rien laisser en vu : l’algorithme regarde, et l’algorithme ne sourit pas en lisant votre message. La disponibilité suit un gradient strict : moins vous avez de levier, plus vous tapez vite. En ce moment même, quelque part, un livreur a 30 secondes pour accepter une course, et un milliardaire laisse mariner le message d’un chef d’État depuis mars. Même téléphone. Autre planète.

Là où j’ai grandi, en Lorraine, tout le monde était offline. On appelait ça la ligne fixe. Ma mère passait des après-midi entiers glorieusement injoignable, pas comme pratique de bien-être, mais comme réglage d’usine de l’univers. Personne n’appelait ça une détox numérique. Personne n’appelait ça du tout. Puis être joignable est devenu obligatoire, et maintenant on nous revend l’injoignabilité comme un produit de luxe. C’est la partie que je trouve sincèrement élégante, d’une élégance un peu maléfique : ils ont pris le réglage par défaut de mon enfance, ils l’ont emballé dans du lin, et ils l’ont mis au prix de The Row. Le silence était gratuit. Revérifiez.

Alors non, je ne supprimerai rien.

Je suis une première génération de tout : première génération à monter une boîte, première génération à optimiser ses impôts, première génération de ma famille dont le métier survit à la pluie. Les gens comme moi n’ont pas encore droit au mystère. Le mystère est un produit de deuxième génération. Il faut que quelqu’un avant vous ait fait le bruit pour que vous puissiez vous offrir le chuchotement. Mes enfants pourront être offline. Moi, je suis encore dans la phase bruyante, et franchement, l’acoustique est correcte.

Ce qui nous amène au moment le plus gênant de cet essai : vous le lisez sur une plateforme, où je l’ai publié, en espérant que l’algorithme m’aime bien aujourd’hui. J’écris sur le statut du silence à un volume d’environ onze. Si être offline est le nouveau flex, cet article, c’est moi, le visage collé à la vitre d’un restaurant où je ne peux pas entrer, en train de prendre des notes sur le menu, et la critique est gratuite.

Mais ça a toujours été le deal ici. Je n’écris pas depuis l’intérieur des codes. J’écris depuis le seuil, à moitié dedans, à moitié dehors, assez près pour décrire la pièce, assez loin pour la trouver encore étrange. Les gens vraiment offline ne liront jamais ceci. Leur assistante, peut-être.

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I’m Adeline, a French writer who built a business so she would never have to stay quiet to keep a job. I grew up in a small town in Lorraine, France, with no family money and no one who knew how to make any. I got out. I did it without becoming a different person, and that, more than the money, is what I write about

We drank out of mustard jars.

Not on principle. Amora sold its mustard in decorated tumblers, Tweety, Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, a collection assembled without anyone ever deciding to assemble it, at the rate a household gets through mustard, which is to say slowly. The cupboard held eight. No two matched. There existed a tacit hierarchy, never once stated aloud, by which Bugs Bunny was the glass of ordinary days and Tweety the one handed to a guest we did not like.

The rest of the kitchen followed the same logic, which was not a logic. Tomato sauce jars ended their lives holding lentils, screws for my father’s workbench, rubber bands. Real plastic containers existed, we saw them in catalogues, and in their place we had Carte d’Or ice cream tubs, washed and stacked by size. I opened a vanilla macadamia tub at seven and found soup in it. One does not recover from this, but one learns. My grandmother’s sewing box was a tin of Danish butter cookies, which is an anthropological fact and not a personal memory.

I think of that cupboard every time I come across an underconsumption core video, which, since January, has been roughly every forty seconds. The format is stable. A kitchen, north light, someone filming a tube of toothpaste rolled down to the bone, shoes resoled twice, and then the centerpiece: an empty candle jar, stripped, repurposed as a water glass. The jar is thick, screen printed, it cost seventy euros back when it still had wax in it. The caption says things I’m not buying in 2026. Four hundred thousand likes. The lighting is magnificent.

This is my childhood with better lighting.

For those fortunate enough to have missed it,
let us define our terms.

Underconsumption core is a genre of content in which one displays what one already owns, worn, mended, repurposed, rather than what one has just bought. It is the haul turned inside out: instead of unboxing, gathering; instead of novelty, patina; instead of quantity, a single moisturizer, shot in close-up, nearly finished. The suffix comes from normcore and marks the passage from practice to style. Which yields, translated honestly, aestheticized frugality. Or, in my mother’s language, a cupboard.

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The gesture is precisely mine, except that mine cost two euros twenty and arrived with mustard inside it. The movement was born on TikTok in the summer of 2024, on the ruins of the haul and the unboxing, driven by the cost of living crisis and by a general exhaustion with people paid to tell us what to buy. It produced the anti-haul, in which one calmly explains what one has not purchased and why. It produced No Buy 2026. It produced a subreddit of more than seventy thousand people who go there to announce their non-purchases before witnesses. That last part is what detains me. An entire forum devoted to the public declaration of the expense avoided.

The criticism is already here, of course, and it is correct. Commentators observe that these gestures are not an innovation but the ordinary routine of the working class and of immigrant families, that one ought therefore to speak of normal consumption core, and that certain highly solvent influencers are performing poverty cosplay for the views. All of this is true. All of this is also slightly beside the point. The charge of insincerity presumes there exists a sincere version of the same content, and that is not where the thing catches. These people are not lying. They really did resole their shoes. Some of them appear to be enjoying it, which is the most disquieting part.

What separates poverty as aesthetic from poverty as memory is therefore not sincerity. It is reversibility. The suffix says so on its own. Core. One appends core to what one is able to leave, and one may leave core on the first of January following, with a summary post. Nobody has ever needed to name the thing that is happening to them.

And then there is what the video does not film, because it cannot be filmed. The cupboard fits in the frame; the mental arithmetic does not. In our house the month ended on the 20th. The eleven days that followed were a regime of continuous calculation, conducted under the breath. One Saturday I watched my mother hand the packet of ham back to the cashier before the total had even appeared on the display. She had done the sum in her head while we advanced in the queue, and she had known, two items earlier, which of the two would go. The cashier took the ham back without comment. My mother did not look humiliated. She looked like a woman whose calculation had just come out exactly right, which, in my memory, greatly resembles pride.

That is the texture. The jars, the soap worn down to a transparent wafer and pressed onto the new bar, all of it is merely the visible surface of an operation that runs day and night for twenty years. You cannot make content out of an operation. You make content out of jars.

Now, the part I should probably leave out.

The first thing I bought when I had money was not an apartment. It was a handbag. Then, in Dubai, a city that practices overconsumption core without a trace of irony and without ever having felt the need to name it, I bought things I had no use for, with a pleasure I have no intention of qualifying in retrospect. It was not a relapse. It was not a liberation either. It was the belated exercise of an option, and the option was the whole of what I had ever wanted.

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Today I live between Dubai and France, which means I own the same object twice, in two countries, and it is always in the other one. I possess three favorite mugs across two continents. I share my life with a hairless cat who wears sweaters in winter. Filmed at the right hour, my apartment would pass without difficulty for underconsumption content. It would be a lie of framing. The bareness here is a service I purchase, and lightness is paid for by weight. Rich frugality is a subscription. My mother’s was a consequence.

So what rises in me watching these videos is not anger, which surprises me, but something flatter and more administrative. The sensation of a misfiled document. Because the uncomfortable truth, absent from the videos and absent from the critiques of the videos alike, is that nobody aestheticizes poverty from inside it. One does not make content about one’s poverty while it is still going on. One gets out or one does not get out, and in neither case does one photograph it. Nostalgia for having little is a privilege of afterwards.

The year there was money, my mother did not resole her shoes. She bought a set of hand blown crackle effect glasses, Bruno Evrard, the range is called Cracky, from a tableware dealer in Saint-Avold. The glass is sold already cracked, that is the principle, the fissure is blown into the material and billed as a premium. They went up to the top of the sideboard, brought out for guests, washed by hand, put back. The mustard jars went down to the cellar, and nobody in the house ever knew precisely when they disappeared.

I was forbidden to touch them. They came cracked from the factory, and I had to be careful not to break them for real.

I’m Adeline, a French writer who built a business so she would never have to stay quiet to keep a job. I grew up in a small town in Lorraine, France, with no family money and no one who knew how to make any. I got out. I did it without becoming a different person, and that, more than the money, is what I write about.

These days most of that work happens inside Good Company Good Counsel, the community I run with Naomi Tina, my friend. Naomi spent years in finance, I build companies from scratch and write about the mess of it, we met on Substack and never stopped talking. The idea is simple. Most advice hands you one clean answer, and most real decisions deserve two honest ones. So we put both reads, hers and mine, on the same ordinary question, and we let the friction stand instead of smoothing it into a single tidy voice.

It was our first coaching session, Naomi and I, two faces in two separate windows, bent over the questions of someone from the community. Not grand metaphysical inquiries. Concrete questions, the kind that look like a knot you cannot loosen on your own and that a second pair of hands undoes in three minutes. For an hour and forty minutes, I was not the center of my own life. And when I hung up, the anxiety that had been camped in my home for weeks had retreated a notch. Not packed its bags. Retreated. Like a tide that gives up a little ground before coming back to check whether the spot is still free.

In the moment, I chalked it up to distraction. Thinking about something else, the old remedy. But that evening, turning it over, I understood it was not quite that. What had done me good was not forgetting my problems. It was having taken hold of something somewhere, regained the upper hand, even if the something belonged to someone else. And this reflex of going to find the place where I can act, I have known it far longer than I have known my anxiety.

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When I was younger, I could have stopped at one sentence, a single one, and it would have absolved me of everything else. I was born into an ordinary family, in Forbach, France, with no money to invest and no one who suspected you could do anything with money other than earn it and spend it. But it was not ignorance, and I refuse to tell it that way. It was the shape life had given money in our house. It came in, it went out, we made the month hold, and that alone was a full-time job. My parents did, at every moment, the best they could with the cards they had been dealt. You do not learn to put money to work when you never have the luxury of letting it sleep.

So what I know today, I had to go find elsewhere, later, alone, in books, in dubious forums at two in the morning, and above all in my own mistakes. I learned real estate, then crypto, then the markets, in that slightly dented order, getting it wrong at every stage and paying for each error the way you pay for a private tutor, expensive and not always good at teaching. I could have, instead, turned my starting point into an injustice and worn it like a second surname. Forbach, born without a manual.

I did not do it, and not out of virtue, I prefer to make that clear before anyone credits me with noble intentions. Out of laziness, almost. Because very early, without being able to name it, I sensed that responsibility was lighter to carry than injustice. That is the thing no one says. We present taking responsibility as an effort, a discipline, a great matter of the clenched jaw. For me it is the reverse. To feel like a victim is to stay locked in a room whose key you have handed to someone else. You can pound on the walls, shout that the room is unfair, badly lit, too small. You will be right on every count. And you will stay inside. To feel responsible is to keep the key in your pocket. The key does not change the size of the room, it does not repaint the walls, it does not let the sun in. It changes only who decides to open the door.

A few years ago, I came across the idea that you could measure this thing. That people divide, roughly, between those who believe their life is decided inside them, in their choices, and those who believe it is decided outside, in luck, in other people, the system, the weather, the evil eye. And that the first sort sleep better, slide less easily into anxiety, get back up faster when life lands a blow. I had two reactions at once, perfectly contradictory. First a slightly foolish recognition, the kind that goes, ah, so it was not just me. Then a small, wounded resistance, because I did not particularly want my most intimate instinct summed up in a two-column chart. They call it locus of control. I had been calling it keeping the key since childhood, and between us, I find my name prettier. But it reassured me to know it was not a personal whim, that others had observed the same thing across thousands of lives before I ever got to it. Science did not found the way I live. It confirmed it, like a mirror you never asked for that has the bad taste to tell the truth.

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So, these last three weeks, anxiety took up residence in the house. I have already written about it in the last piece, but I had not said how much the body joins in, without permission. Sleep left first. Then the weight. Then the energy, in that order, like lights switched off one by one as you leave an apartment. The body keeps its own accounts, and it bills you for things you never ordered.

There is a temptation, in these moments, that disguises itself as wisdom. Suspend everything. Tell yourself it is not the right time, that you will get back to it once you feel better, that you are perfectly entitled to a pause. Treat yourself as a convalescent and push the rest off to some vaguely sunlit future where you will have become yourself again. The trouble is that this future never sets a date.

I did not suspend anything. Not out of heroism, I distrust that word as much as the other one. I kept the agency going. I kept Good Company Good Counsel going. I did the small invisible things that look like nothing and yet hold a person upright. Drink water. Go out and walk with not the slightest desire to. Go to bed early even when sleep was no more than a rumor. And grant myself, without guilt, the tender moments with myself that I needed, the ones we permit ourselves badly because they produce nothing measurable. All of it, not because it was easy. It was not. But because stopping completely, right then, would have meant handing the key to the anxiety and telling it, go on, you manage the calendar from now on. And between us, as a roommate, I did not trust it with that.

I do not always respond well in the moment. No one does, and those who claim otherwise are lying or have an accommodating memory. But afterward, I dissect. It is almost a tic. I go back over the way I approached the thing, I draw up the mental list of the right moves and the botched ones. Not to flog myself, and not to award myself a medal either. Only to locate the precise spot where my hand slipped. The time I answered a client too fast and felt, the second I pressed send, that I had just given up ground out of fear rather than judgment. The message is gone, I cannot retrieve it, no key has ever made that possible despite my prayers. But I can understand which spring was tripped, and next time, see it coming a second sooner. A second sounds ridiculous. It is often the whole difference. It is not a victory journal, it is a way of recovering a little grip for the next time.

As a child, I think I already saw responsibility as a kind of sanctioned magic. A possible tampering with fate. The idea that no sequence of events is ever entirely sealed, that there is always a spot, however tiny, however badly placed, where my response counts. It is not control, and I hold to the distinction like the apple of my eye. Control is an illusion, I know that, you choose neither the family you are born into, nor the week anxiety shows up without knocking, nor the nightmares that come with it. What I decide is more modest, and sturdier for it. There is a part that belongs to me, always, even reduced to a single thread. And that thread, I can pull. That is all. But it is enormous, because it is precisely the difference between being subjected to a story and having a hand in it, however small, however shaky.

Last night, after the call, I slept. Really slept, for a long time, for the first time in three weeks. My body collected all at once everything I owed it. And then a nightmare woke me in the middle of the night, heart in a panic, chest tight, the full set, the anxiety back to knock at the exact moment I thought it had left for good. A few days ago, that would have been enough to keep me awake until morning. This time, I breathed, I waited, and I fell back asleep. It is not much. It is everything, in fact.

I did not fix my anxiety in an hour and forty minutes, nor in one night, it does not work that way, I know that now better than before. I only did what I have known how to do since Forbach. I looked, in a hard day and a broken night, for the part that belonged to me. Yesterday it was an hour and forty minutes given to someone else. Last night it was falling back asleep.

I’m Adeline, a French writer who built a business so she would never have to stay quiet to keep a job. I grew up in a small town in Lorraine, France, with no family money and no one who knew how to make any. I got out. I did it without becoming a different person, and that, more than the money, is what I write about.

These days most of that work happens inside Good Company Good Counsel, the community I run with , my friend. Naomi spent years in finance, I build companies from scratch and write about the mess of it, we met on Substack and never stopped talking. The idea is simple. Most advice hands you one clean answer, and most real decisions deserve two honest ones. So we put both reads, hers and mine, on the same ordinary question, and we let the friction stand instead of smoothing it into a single tidy voice.

Same person, different tax bracket

Why You Shouldn't Be This Good at Keeping It In

Tobias loves to travel. I want to make that clear right away, because in a few lines he is going to have a very bad time, and I would hate for anyone to mistake me for one of those people who drag their cat across the world against its will. Toby is a willing participant. He likes bags, cars, unfamiliar windows, the smell of airports. He travels better …

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2 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Adeline

So we had taken him to an island in Thailand, because after Dubai, after Bangkok, after months of concrete and air conditioning set too cold, we needed trees and the illusion that we were about to breathe differently. We did not stop working for it, of course, you do not do that when you run a studio and your clients could not care less whether you are watching a sunset. But we wanted a parenthesis, a bit of green, the kind of break you grant yourself while telling yourself it counts as rest.

And then Toby started throwing up.

The fever climbed in a single day. He went limp to the point of not being able to lift his head, eyes half shut, and you should know that a sick Sphynx does not get to hide anything, he has no fur to soften the news. On the island, naturally, no vet. A very kind American vet tried to help, without any equipment to make even the smallest diagnosis, which amounted to holding our hand politely. For the rest, the island offered smoothie sellers, two or three half-abandoned resorts, a handful of Seven Elevens, and men who rent out scooters. Nothing that cures a cat. So we took the first ferry at five in the morning, then drove three hours, the carrier on my lap and Tobias staring at me as if I were personally responsible for the situation, a theory I had, deep down, already accepted.

The thing is, this is how I operate. I have a ten-year vision, one, clear and slightly stupid: build something, make enough money to be free. It is the only distant horizon I can name. For everything else I have no plan, I have days. I get up, I throw myself at the pile, I push forward, I tick the boxes, and the next day I start again, and the whole machine runs perfectly as long as you never stop. And to never stop, there is a trick I have mastered for a long time: you put your emotions in a closet, and you shut the door with your knee.

Three years of shutting that door with my knee.

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I left a real job, the kind that reassures the people around you when you mention it. I left a city I deeply loved living in. I left my region, and therefore my parents, which is something you never really say out loud because it is supposed to be the normal price of ambition. We moved to Dubai, took Tobias with us, started again from nothing. Then came the war in the Middle East, which touched us closely, and we had to leave somewhat urgently for Thailand. At every step, the suitcases, the time zones, the addresses that keep changing, and always the clients on top, because you do not put a studio on pause just because your life is relocating by six thousand kilometers. Filing it away, filing it away, filing it away. It had started quietly with stomach aches I blamed on what I was eating, while the body was simply sending its invoices long before it would even consider cutting the power.

Tobias lying on the bed in his brown blanket, and the medication meant to save him making him sicker than the illness itself, that was the full invoice, presented all at once. The closet opened, and everything came out together.

I do not know how to describe this to someone who has never been through it, so I will stick to the facts. This week I cried about fifteen times a day, with no identifiable grief, no trigger, waves that rise without warning and fold you in half in the middle of a sentence. A lump in the throat that never loosens. Another in the stomach that seals the entrance, so that you end up looking at a plate like a math problem set by someone cruel. And at night, an anxiety so dense that sleep refuses to come, even wrung out with exhaustion, even when the body is begging for mercy. The highlight, of course, stays the treadmill, where I walked and sobbed facing a wall, drenched in sweat, for reasons I could not have named even under threat.

Here is what nobody bothers to tell you about the art of keeping everything to yourself. It does not disappear. You think you are emptying out, you are actually storing, and it does not sit flat, it runs in silence, at a rate you never agreed to. Every emotion refused in the moment keeps turning in the dark, quietly, gathering its interest. You think you are solid because nothing shows, when in fact you are signing a debt. And the day it comes due, it never comes due in reasonable installments. It comes due in full, on a Tuesday, because of a cat.

The funniest part is that it was raining without pause. We were deep in the rainy season, water streaming from morning to night over the roof, over the trees, over the whole world, and I, who had pulled off the feat of staying perfectly watertight for three years, had chosen exactly this setting to start leaking from everywhere.

Today Toby is better. He stopped the medication that was doing him no good, he is eating again, and he still looks at me as if I were guilty, in which he is not entirely wrong. Except he interrupted the antibiotic before the end, so the bacteria can come back, and a countdown has installed itself in my head. I think about it constantly, watching for the moment he tips over again. And I suspect that countdown of hiding others, all those things from the last three years that have not had their turn yet and are waiting in the closet, neatly stacked, holding out for the right Tuesday.

I keep going anyway. I am writing this today, and I am rather proud to be writing it instead of swallowing it one more time out of habit. In forty minutes I have a call for a project that matters to me, and I will take it, with the lump in my throat and slightly trembling hands, because being an entrepreneur is also that, never quite stopping, taking care of yourself as best you can but moving forward regardless, sometimes in pain. The trap is that I spent three years doing only that last part, moving forward in pain while jamming the door shut with my knee, and I have seen where it leads. So I am looking for the balance point, the one that means going on without sealing myself watertight, letting the water through as it comes, in small bearable amounts, so I never have to settle the whole thing on the same day.

The call is in thirty-five minutes. The rain will be back soon. Toby is asleep by the window, perfectly calm, and he is the only one of us who is, I think, actually at peace.

I’m Adeline, a French writer who built a business so she would never have to stay quiet to keep a job. I grew up in a small town in Lorraine, France, with no family money and no one who knew how to make any. I got out. I did it without becoming a different person, and that, more than the money, is what I write about.

That morning, something is moving on the beach. On all fours.

A stray dog, you’ll tell me. There are stray dogs everywhere in Thailand, so why not on the sand. That is exactly what I thought. Then I squinted, and between my international myopia and a brain still half asleep, I was sure I was still dreaming.

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The dog was a man. Forty-five, fifty years old. On all fours, in full sprint, fetching a stick that Jeanine, roughly the same age, had just thrown for him. Now, who am I to judge anyone’s kinks. I admit I do not fully get the furry thing, or pony play, so I try to quiet my reptilian brain, even if at 9:57am on Koh Chang I am struggling a little.

Because it has to be said: the stride was impressive. Building up that much momentum and running on all fours is not something everyone can pull off. Bon point.

Stick proudly retrieved, Jeanine takes it back and strides confidently toward the water. To rinse it. Because you can throw a piece of wood you found on the sand, catch it in your mouth, and still care about hygiene, right?

Left hand, the wet stick, dripping. Right hand, a small black rectangle. And unless you have spent the last fifteen years in a cave, you recognized, like I did, the sleek silhouette of a latest-generation smartphone.

She comes back and plants herself in front of him, bends her knees slightly to get just above him, and films. The gentleman grabs the wood, refuses to let go. Jeanine pulls with everything she has.

My crooked little finger whispers in my ear, oui oui, that the final destination of this video is not exactly the camera roll on madame’s phone. More like a feed. Instagram, OnlyFans, who knows.

Cold coffee. Et merde.

A few words with my partner and his brother, who saw it too. A long silent exchange with the inner Adeline, who could not get over it. And then something hits me, more disturbing than anything on that beach.

I wasn’t all that surprised.

Not the man, not the stick, not Jeanine and her low-angle shot. My own shrug. That is what should have woken me up. From scrolling through so much content, so many images, so many videos, I had been prepared for this without knowing it. The feed had vaccinated me.

It echoed my last essay, and I am starting to believe it for real. A German sociologist, Simmel, wrote it back in 1903, long before the first iPhone: in the big city, drowning in the crowd, you are pushed to exaggerate your quirks just to stay visible, to exist a little in other people’s eyes. Swap ‘big city’ for ‘social media’ and you land right on the beach at Koh Chang, this morning.

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A tentacular city, no edges, no closing time, where standing out gets so hard that everyone, each at their own scale, ends up breaking the mold. Any mold. It doesn’t matter which.

What Simmel could not foresee is that breaking the mold, when everyone does it, builds a new mold. The non-conformists all end up looking alike. Our man on all fours was not an anomaly, he was a conformist of singularity, perfectly up to date. And views, likes, comments have become what money already was: a currency that flattens everything, and forces you to shout ever louder just to still be worth something.

The man eventually let go of the stick. Jeanine put her phone away. I finished my cold coffee. On that beach, the only truly strange behavior was mine.

Being so unfazed.

I’m Adeline, and I write The Chapter Club, a small corner of the internet for people trying to stay recognizable to themselves while life keeps changing the scenery.

I started writing because I wanted to prove, mostly to myself, that we do not have to become a new person every time we enter a new city, a new circle, a new relationship, or a new chapter. We can be shaped by places and people without being swallowed by them. These essays are my field notes on staying yourself, even when everything around you keeps trying to edit the script.

If you like this essay, check out those ones:

The city does the opposite. More people, more places to cross paths, and somehow fewer crossings. Here the baker does not run the post office, and you can walk past the same face three mornings in a row without ever owing it a name. The crowd dilutes you, like a shoal of fish: in one blink, Roger looks like any other guy down the hall.

I started this Substack to put my thoughts in order. At first they were living drafts, wedged between my clients’ design deliverables, filed with no logic and very little respect for these letters to myself. Then I published them, telling myself they might resonate with someone, without quite admitting that what I really want, deep down, is humans to talk to. I posted expecting nothing. Just to recycle the four hours I had spent untangling my own knot of thoughts.

The next morning, 9:30, I get out of bed and… nothing. Not a comment, not a like. Just Tobias demanding his breakfast. It was almost reassuring: nobody was waiting for me. So I kept going, out of habit, because writing your thoughts down is more dignified than spiraling under a Bangkok sun that has clearly taken your presence as a personal offense.

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One reader, then five, then thirty, then sixty. The idea of posting into the void evaporated, replaced by sixty small pairs of eyes. In theory? Wonderful. In practice? My old demons.

Back to the performance waltz, a not-especially-romantic dance between me and my chronic need to be productive. So I did more. I studied how other people managed to “perform”, and I did it this entire week, blocking my writing entirely. How to sell myself better, show myself better, get myself read more.
The pleasure of writing gave way to a knot in my stomach that now arrived before Tobias even asked for his dinner.

And then it clicked: social media is exactly the city. A sprawling digital megalopolis where standing out is a content Hunger Games, where the currency is engagement and the cornucopia is virality. Getting noticed becomes a matter of public utility. You try everything: humiliating yourself, talking to your camera, romanticizing your life, swearing you understood nothing or, on the contrary, that you cracked the entire code.

After a rigorous benchmark and a competitive Instagram analysis, I reached two conclusions:

• Either every woman on this platform is, give or take, the same person.

• Or the point is not to express yourself as you are, but to adopt the trends and slot into one of the available frames.

That is where the real anxiety begins. What do I do, when I am literally made of all these facets at once? I am a founder, boss-girl edition, and yet some days I understand nothing about anything, and I own it. I am a clean girl, with a plate that has been fossilizing in the sink since Tuesday. I travel, and some evenings I want nothing more than to go home. I am literary, and I work in crypto. After five hours of intensive scrolling, the verdict is in: I do not fit a box. And I refuse to caricature myself into the next Leila Hormozi, because the things I have to share belong to me.

Individuality has become a rare commodity.
Dare to think sideways and the stake is never far off, 2026 edition: no public square, just a feed and a comments section. The thought of the day is smooth as a newborn’s bottom, and everyone recites it by heart.

Same thoughts, same faces, same content: without quite knowing how, every creator ended up serving the same soup. Rather bland, not very good, and certainly not nutritious.

A village. That is what I want. There, nobody asks you to reduce yourself to a single box: they take you with all your facets at once, because they know your stories. They know who your parents were, where your family comes from. They know that if Roger shouts so much, it is because something hurts. So the village hands him bandages: it listens to him, keeps him busy, gives him things that suit him.

Maybe the solution is to treat writing like a village, not like a city.
So I am choosing to write for sixty neighbors, not sixty metrics.

I’m Adeline, and I write The Chapter Club, a small corner of the internet for people trying to stay recognizable to themselves while life keeps changing the scenery.

I started writing because I wanted to prove, mostly to myself, that we do not have to become a new person every time we enter a new city, a new circle, a new relationship, or a new chapter. We can be shaped by places and people without being swallowed by them. These essays are my field notes on staying yourself, even when everything around you keeps trying to edit the script.

If you like this essay, check out those ones:

I am walking slowly, but also as fast as my body will allow under a sun that appears to have taken my presence personally. My hair has expanded into its own weather system, and I am holding a bottle of Pocari Sweat, my essential beverage, because,
as we know from every man in every survival movie, it has electrolytes.

I have chosen the wrong clothes again: a skirt that is too heavy, a tank top that is cutting into my shoulder, and a headband that is having a small territorial dispute with the oversized helmet from the rental scooter.

And the funny thing is, in Dubai, I would never have left the house like this, not even to buy milk.

In Dubai, I checked my reflection twice before doing anything that involved being visible to another human being. The city trains you without announcing that training has begun. After a few months, I had my routines: gym, good food, client meetings, and, more importantly, that strange public restraint that settles onto your face when everyone around you seems to have silently agreed to perform in the same play.

Everyone is dressed for the role, everyone knows their best angle, and the whole city starts to feel like a giant glass display case of people presenting the premium version only.

To be fair, that is also why people go there. Business, connections, opportunities.
The city itself behaves that way too: beautiful, organized, flamboyant, with that slightly suspicious level of perfection that makes you wonder if even the palm trees have a personal brand.

And you adjust, not dramatically, not at first, but quietly, in small ways that begin to look like choices until you realize they were also instructions.

Dubai changed me, objectively. Maybe for the better, because I eat better and move my body more. Maybe for the worse, because I now have this irritating habit of calculating how I am being perceived, no matter the occasion, which is very elegant, very exhausting, and not especially chill.

Which is funny, because to the people I grew up with in Forbach, I am probably still exactly the same person: Adeline who climbed trees.

That version is frozen. It does not update. It does not care how many countries I have moved through since. Somewhere, in someone else’s mind, I am still there, covered in dirt, probably too loud, definitely not dressed for the occasion.

And then in other places, nobody knows who you are supposed to be, which is one of the most terrifying luxuries of arriving somewhere new. Nobody has the old file on you. Nobody is watching through the keyhole of your previous life. You can test versions of yourself that your old circle would have found completely inconsistent, and nobody is there to raise an eyebrow and ask since when.

Then you arrive in Bangkok and realize you can breathe differently.

The city is alive, messy, honest. It moves in every direction at once, and it does not seem particularly interested in making itself look seamless. There is traffic, food, heat, noise, temples, malls, wires, scooters, beauty, chaos, and none of it is pretending to be frictionless.

People feel different here too.

In Dubai, making a friend who did not seem at least mildly interested in my wallet, my network, or my usefulness felt like a competitive sport. I am exaggerating, obviously. I did make one friend in eight months, which is very impressive and probably deserves some kind of embassy notification.

In Bangkok, I have been here a month and a half and already have four contacts that happened naturally. No pitch deck, no strategic alignment, no one asking what I do before deciding whether I am worth a second conversation.

The day I saw expats walking through the mall in socks and sandals, with absolutely no visible concern for the human gaze, I knew I was no longer in Dubai, and I loved them for it.

I am, by the way, fully team Birks and socks, which is a controversial but spiritually correct position.

Some people will say Dubai and Bangkok attract completely different demographics. I understand the argument. I also reject it, because I am literally the evidence. I went to both. Same woman, worse outfit, better breathing.

But this is where the problem starts.

New place, new me.

It is basically the adult version of having an era, or New Year’s resolutions with better lighting. You arrive somewhere, you learn things, you imitate what seems to work, you borrow habits from the people around you, and slowly the original version gets edited by the city.

Then you move again.

And if you are like me, which means you move around with just enough frequency to make furniture feel like a personal attack, you start collecting fragments of yourself all over the world.

Business girl in Dubai, chill girl in Thailand, sophisticated girl in France. It begins to feel like choosing a costume depending on where you put your suitcase down, and there is something deeply unserious about that. Maybe even dishonest. For me, no thank you.

I had a preview of this years before, on my first day as an analyst but also designer at Deloitte, which is already a sentence having an identity crisis.

I walked through the security gates and immediately met my nemesis, everywhere.

Women dressed in black. Same uniform. It looked like a corporate funeral being held across several floors, with an afterparty in the elevator. Tight bun, polished shoes, small structured bag, the kind of bag that knows what a pension plan is.

Then I got into the elevator with Madame Structured Bag and made the worst possible decision: I looked in the mirror.

I had orange dyed hair, platform shoes, and a backpack, and for a second, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. Probably both. There she was, the temptation of my Big Four era, entering the chat before I had even opened my laptop.

And I did think about it, of course I did. Usually at night, right before falling asleep, when the brain becomes a small unpaid consultant. Maybe I should buy the black trousers. Maybe I should become more polished. Maybe I should become the kind of woman whose bag has opinions about quarterly reporting.

But the question is not really whether places change us, because they do.

The question is what remains constant while they do it.

What part of your identity survives the climate, the clothes, the industry, the people around you, the city’s little pressure campaign?

Because the work is not to become someone new at every stage. The work is to stay faithful to yourself while everything around you keeps changing.

Imagine the kind of monster I would be if I had fully transformed into a corporate girl. Sorry to the corporate girls, I simply do not have the vision.

There is a spine to identity, and it is not the aesthetic, not the outfit, not the city version, not the girl boss episode, the backpacker episode, the expat episode, or the sudden ownership of linen trousers.

The spine is what you keep doing even when nobody from your old life is there to recognize you.

It is the discipline you did not abandon, the structure you carry with you, and the values that remain the same whether you are wearing Chanel or something you bought in a Bangkok market because you were sweating through your last remaining dignity.

My mother in law once told me something I still think about: “When two values are in conflict, put them on a little mental scale. That is when you see which one really matters.”I love that, because identity is easy when all your values agree with each other. It becomes interesting when they do not.

Freedom versus loyalty. Ambition versus peace. Reinvention versus recognition. The desire to become more versus the fear of becoming unrecognizable.

For me, the spine is small and stubborn.

A quiet morning, black coffee, Tobias fed, soft music, sun through the window, wherever the window happens to be.

Messages full of love to my mother, who keeps fighting every day whether I am close enough to help or not.

Daily attention to the person I love.

Making something, whatever it is, and doing it properly. Not casually, not halfway, not with the limp energy of someone who is trying to look detached because caring is embarrassing.

That is my spine.

Not the city, not the outfit, not the version of me that other people find most convenient.

So if you feel nostalgic for who you were before the environment started shaping you, before the people, the places, the ambitions, the disappointments, the survival strategies, before life started quietly editing your edges, ask yourself this:

What is still there?

What remains at the bottom of you when everything around you keeps moving?

Not who did you become.The one who survived.

I’m Adeline, and I write The Chapter Club, a small corner of the internet for people trying to stay recognizable to themselves while life keeps changing the scenery.

I started writing because I wanted to prove, mostly to myself, that we do not have to become a new person every time we enter a new city, a new circle, a new relationship, or a new chapter. We can be shaped by places and people without being swallowed by them. These essays are my field notes on staying yourself, even when everything around you keeps trying to edit the script.

If you like this essay, check out those ones:

At nine, while Justine was rehearsing her piano piece for the end-of-year recital, the one on the primary school porch, I was already, I don’t know, riding BMX. Pokémon cards, aikido, dance, drawing, forest trails, skateboard, electric scooter: name it, I tried it. People called me “creative,” which in second grade means weird.

I grew up, I swapped forest trails for tattoos, then salt-dough crafts, then Instagram accounts, then business ideas that changed every two seconds, then jobs I got tired of. Always full of interests, wildly invested then completely detached. Shiny object syndrome, as if that were a diagnosis.

From the outside, it looks like a discipline problem.
From the inside, it’s the same thing, but with a narrator.

I’m going to tell you what actually changed for me at the end of this post. Spoiler: it’s not “love yourself as you are.” It’s harder than that, and it’s the only reason AstraOS still exists three years in.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the person, the label is just bad.

My best friend in middle school used the same pen for three years, all chewed up, her signature (respect). Me, I’d gone through seven pens before she noticed mine wasn’t the same. She never actually did. I had to tell her.

Life is a market, and we all have access to the market. Every week there’s a new aisle, and yet you see people (consenting adults) decide to camp out between the mushrooms and the zucchini for forty years. At some point there are blue peppers, there are purple lemons. I didn’t make this up.

Is it the ego? Probably. The ego of getting to say “I’ve been doing this for twenty years.” Cool, and?

Anyway. If your forehead says:

• Inconsistent

• Unfocused

• Too sensitive

• Unrealistic

• Too much

• Lost

• Dramatic

• Difficult

• Not serious enough

Try instead:

• “Indecisive” when you’re actually curious.

• “Inconsistent” when you actually run in seasons (vivaldi-core).

• “Too much” when you’ve got several lives in one person (could be a problem, could be a gift, jury’s out).

• “Unfocused” when you just haven’t found your system yet.

This is where I want to stop, because if I leave it at “rewrite your labels,” I’ve written a self-help post, and we both deserve better.

Rewriting labels is necessary, but it’s not enough. You can call yourself curious instead of indecisive all day long, but if every new interest still cannibalizes the last one, nothing actually changes. You just have nicer vocabulary for the same problem.

What actually works, and it took me embarrassingly long to figure this out, is this: you need one thing that doesn’t move. A spine. Everything else is allowed to be a tangent, a season, a phase, a dead-end with a useful nugget in it. But there’s one road, and that one road is paved.

For me, the spine is discipline. Work, structure, organization, building. That’s the part that doesn’t get to drift, ever, under any circumstance. Everything else does.

That’s the only reason AstraOS exists. Not because I’m consistent in general (I’m not, see above, the seven pens), but because I’m uncompromising on that. Clients, deadlines, systems, ops, design quality, the things that hold the studio together are the things I refuse to let slip. The rest, the side projects, the new interest of the week, branch out from that trunk. They don’t compete with it.

I love discipline, I love structure. I’m also the folle du bus (the crazy one in the bus). Both things are true at the same time, and they have to be, because one of them holds the other one up.

Before I understood this, every new thing I started felt like a referendum on the last one. I’d open an Instagram account, get bored, quit, and that quit felt like proof. I developed this little internal jingle that went from now on I don’t start anything it’s pointless I never finish anyway and it won’t go anywhere because I’ll quit, every time it’s the same. Basically a lullaby. Eventually I believed it.

Starting something without finishing it became a six-armed final boss. Me, wet noodle of a sword. Statistically, not the best launch strategy.

What changed isn’t that I started finishing everything. I still don’t. What changed is that finishing stopped being the test. The test moved to the spine. As long as the spine holds, the tangents are just tangents, not evidence of a broken person.

So. The actual method.

Once you know what your spine is, the work is to protect it. That means removing everything that pulls energy away from it, and giving yourself permission to explore the rest in low-stakes mode.

- Remove the friction. Identify what makes you quit. Not in theory, specifically. For me, it’s admin. Anything administrative, I will find a way to bail. For you it might be public stakes, or perfectionism, or the moment it stops being fun. Name it precisely, then engineer it out. Personal assistant, AI agent, your best friend, whatever works. The friction has to go somewhere that isn’t you.

- Ration your interest like it’s expensive, because it is. Don’t give a new thing everything on day one. The brighter the flame on day one, the smaller the chance you’re still tending it on day forty. Pace yourself on purpose.

- Build the version that survives a bad week. Every new thing has a motivation dip around week three. If your setup requires day-one enthusiasm to keep running, you’re already cooked. Twenty minutes, once. Not two hours, daily, forever.

- Start in private. Public stakes accelerate the quit, because now there’s an audience watching you walk away. Make the first version invisible. Tell people once it’s a habit, not when it’s a vow.

- Filter through the spine. When something new shows up, ask one question: does this reinforce the spine, or does it compete with it? Curiosity gets a yes by default. Things that ask you to compromise the spine get a no, no matter how shiny they look on Tuesday.

- Make peace with stopping. This is the counterintuitive one. The more terrified you are of quitting, the worse you start things, because you’re already in defensive mode. Permission to stop is what lets you start clean. The spine is what makes that permission safe to give yourself.

That’s the whole thing. No twelve-step, no masterclass. One immovable trunk, several roads, and the discipline to know which is which.

A life with many chapters can look messy from the outside, especially to people who need one clean storyline to feel safe. That’s fine for them, they can stay in their aisle.

The blue peppers are over here.

I’m Adeline. I’m in my expat era. I’m currently writing this from Bangkok, which still feels like a decision I made while only half awake. There have been many eras before this one and there will be many more after. The Chapter Club is for people who keep moving through chapters, side quests, and small obsessions, and would like a system gentle enough to hold all of it.

Curious but structured. Multi-chapter but not lost. Side quests, never chaos. Apprivoiser, not perform.

Big 4 in Luxembourg. Remote work in the south of France. Co-founding a design agency in Dubai. Writing, now, from Bangkok.For a long time I was ashamed of it. No straight line, no clean answer to so what do you do? a long list of things I loved doing, and not one I was actually excellent at. Good at many. Excellent at none.

And then, slowly, I started to suspect that the thing I was actually excellent at was the curiosity itself. The starting over. The being okay with a new chapter when the old one wasn’t done with me.

The Chapter Club is for people whose main quest is, secretly, their side quests.

It’s 7 PM. I descend to the lobby to retrieve my order, just dropped off by the courier on the small white table near the entrance, already crowded with other deliveries. I don’t know who cooked it. I don’t even remember the name of the restaurant I tapped on, or the name of the dish, which was written in Thai anyway. Now I choose by the photo, and I cross my fingers. Back in my room, settled on that rounded sort of sofa facing the bed, I unwrap the thin transparent container from its plastic bag, where my receipt has been carefully stapled.

Containers, or Tupp’, as we call them in my Family, we have plenty of them at home, in Lorraine, France. A collection, even. Beware whoever opens the drawer beneath the microwave; we’re never far from a plastic avalanche. My father arranges them methodically, for himself, with the affection of someone preparing a client’s order, with a particular care only he possesses. He pulls out five from the drawer, and each will be filled with a different dish, which he’ll eat at noon, or perhaps in the evening, in the small Airbnb he’s rented for the week, like a little portion of home’s flavor, even from far away.

When someone asked my father the traditional question, what do you want to be when you grow up, he answered cook, without hesitation. And he became one, cook. Culinary school, hospitality internship, even one in the mountains, in a renowned hotel, s’il vous plaît! Life led him to become a cook in a retirement home, and that’s when I arrived in his life, by the way. He has since changed professions, but you don’t erase such an important part of your life just like that. He may be a welder now, but cooking will remain in his habits, whether he cooks for himself or for others, he will always take pleasure in it.

Like him, going off on weekly assignments in Germany, I left Dubai over a month ago ,not really by choice. The first place, country, city, condominium where I felt rather at home, after a few months. We had bought a candle that smelled clean, an orange vase with all those little ridges, and I had even won a cushion shaped like a cat, all soft. As if I had apprivoisé the place.

Apprivoiser. I keep this one in French because the English equivalents miss the point. Tame is for horses. Domesticate sounds like a project. Apprivoiser is softer than both, what you do to a place slowly, accumulating small recognitions: which drawer holds the spoons, how the candle smells when you light it, the orange vase you walk past every day until you stop seeing it.

Except maybe the air conditioning, which remained a mystery to me, all-or-nothing functioning, either too warm or absolute frost. So for this adventure, I wanted a room that resembled an apartment, somewhat. I took the largest one, the one with a bigger refrigerator, a real sofa, a washing machine, and a cooktop, enough to cook my favorite dishes, my childhood dishes, the ones that exercise memory.

Galushkis. Or Galoushkis? I never knew how to spell it. The taste, though, that I know by heart. It’s my favorite dish. I always thought it was Russian. My paternal grandmother calls them melkdnedle, the German version. And a friend from Kazakhstan knows them too, she says they’re Ukrainian. No one really knows where they come from. But I know that the creamy taste, the texture like a small cloud, will remind me of home forever, regardless of where the dish actually comes from.

Bangkok, more than a month here, in the same hotel, frequenting the same 7-Eleven, which has ultimately replaced my kitchen, my cooktop, my childhood dishes. When I say two steps, I mean two steps. I go there every day, at least once, for my famous chicken-and-egg combo. There’s a rotation of cashiers, but I often see the same young woman. Pale complexion, dark eyeliner, black hair gathered back with a black bow, and of course, the famous 7-Eleven uniform. I remember her, I can describe her, I recognize her every time I walk through the door that greets me with its famous Hello, welcooome. But she, I may be mistaken , still doesn’t recognize me.

For Tobias, it’s 100% wet food, with mineral water added on top, s’il vous plaît. I finally have my preferred little pet store, where I order online. No face, no physical presence, yet by the fifth order, I started receiving small signs of affection, my cat food arrived in a small cardboard box covered in colors and cats with eyes too big, a little treat for Tobias, wrapped in transparent plastic, with a small heart sticker on top. It made me smile.

I have, of course, dropped a few grains of rice on the round sofa. The table is now covered in waste, an empty container, a can with a bit of soda still at the bottom, a plastic bag I tore open fifteen minutes ago, too impatient to eat. After a small sigh of satisfaction, I gather it all into a larger bag, which will wait outside the door for the housekeeper to take away. This empty container, this one, will not join the famous Tupp’ collection back home.

The first glimpse of the message, in this hotel room in Bangkok, Tobias stretched out on the pillow next to me, my right hand travels from my phone to my heart, fingers shaking a little. Breath gone. Two or three seconds of nothing. A deep breath in, the kind you take before doctor’s news and late-night calls. I tap. My parents are singing. And right next to the candle: the tartelette aux fraises.

I’m three years old. I’m four. I don’t know exactly. My mother is a florist, my father a cook, we live in a pale pink housing block, top floor. An artist’s flat, with lions and savannah painted on the wall in the hallway, bright yellow streaks on the floor that will never come out, leftovers from my father cleaning his new wheel rims. Right now, it’s either I eat or they eat, and I often go to grandma’s for lunch without knowing why. Today I wake up, it’s my birthday. Coming out of my room I see something round, red, shiny, with something stuck into it, lighting up the table. Strawberries set out gently, with a bigger strawberry placed on top, standing up. Underneath the strawberries, something like a sweet cloud, held up by a hard shell, like soft packed sand. It sits there, on the living room table, which doubles as a desk, a catch-all, and a dining table. My parents were waiting on the couch by the bay window, eyes shining, a coffee in hand.

I hear the dogs as soon as the car is parked in the Lorraine driveway, windows shut. Once at the front door, my mother opens it far too fast with a smile she tries to hold back and that comes back anyway. Her movement, with BIIIIP, the alarm my father set up, which never misses a chance to flag a coming or a going. A furry tidal wave crashes onto me, my parents and my partner. Laika and Wookie, swept up by the joy of seeing us again, and by the biscuits, and by the smell of outside on my coat, but mostly by the biscuits. Drool, hopping on my legs, and love raw and plain, that’s the agenda for the next 15 minutes.

The lift dings a floor , biiip. At the same moment, Tobias drops flat on his belly, claws sunk into the carpet, crawls toward the bright square thrown on the floor, far down the hallway, ground only he can read. The dogs, behind their doors, sniffing. The cleaning women, soft-hearted but shy. The others, thrown off, even scared.

In Lorraine, France, ten minutes flat: I’m already in soft clothes and my mother is already in pyjamas, no make-up, slippers on. The candles set out all over the living room, lit one by one under my mother’s hand with her favourite electric lighter, which has been in the house for at least two years now. My father, already settled on the couch, with Merlin lying on his stomach - the second hairless cat, but this one without wrinkles, is doing his daily Spanish lesson on Duolingo, the television on by default. My partner, lying on my bed, legs crossed, lost in a podcast most likely on Bitcoin trends, or maybe on the latest in AI.

Back from the expedition. Nothing has moved. No smell, the sound off, the temperature held steady, my suitcase still in the same place, open and badly packed. I take off my shoes, I sit on the white bed where Elio, still lying there, legs crossed, watches a video. I look up. The ceiling is not the right ceiling.

I wipe my cheek with my hand, once, twice, three times, then too many times. Without a word, Elio gets up and brings me the tissues. Tobias climbs onto the bed, like a small spring that flops down.