--- title: "Mum's the word" description: "On life editing — quietly removing the parts of your life you think will cost you something, and what it costs to keep doing it." url: "https://gentlespace.net/letters/mums-the-word" letterNumber: 3 datePublished: "2026-09-09T12:11:18.400Z" dateModified: "2026-09-09T13:15:06Z" author: "Clare" --- # Mum's the word On a hidden diagnosis, a high risk pregnancy, and the years I spent deleting the inconvenient parts of my life. > I had quietly removed the option, and then arranged my life around a choice I didn't know I had made. I once took a client call from a cleaning cupboard. I was twenty five, nearly twenty six, with a cannula in my arm and an infusion running, and the nurses had learned to set me up somewhere quiet so I could do video calls. They were being kind. They had no idea they were helping me edit out a large part of my life. This is a story that starts with an illness and ends with a baby. It took me years to work out that they were the same story. You might have seen the phrase life editing going round lately. It came up on Woman's Hour in August, when Eshita Kabra, who founded By Rotation, talked about not being open about being pregnant, even when she was asked point blank. I hadn't heard the term before. When I did, I knew exactly what I was: a recovering life editor. Life editing is what we do when we quietly remove the parts of our lives we think will cost us something. Not lying, exactly. Editing. Choosing which bits make the final cut and deleting the rest. The phrase is new. The behaviour is not. In 1963 the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a book called Stigma, in which he separated out two things people do with a trait the world treats as a problem. Passing is hiding it completely. Covering is letting it be known, but keeping it quiet, unobtrusive, easy for everyone else to work around. Forty years later the American law professor Kenji Yoshino built an entire book on the second one. Sixty years of sociology, and it still comes down to a woman in a cupboard with a laptop. In 2018, after being very unwell, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. I was working in Canary Wharf at the time and my career was taking off. Bigger clients, bigger targets, more responsibility. So I pressed delete. Following surgery I began treatment straight away: infusions every four weeks, two to three hours at a time. I took calls from the corridor, wheeling the drip stand with me, strategically muting the call when the beeps would start shouting to say that the bag was almost empty. After a few infusions the nurses got to know me and probably got sick of chasing me around the halls, so they found me a room to work from, and as I say, it was a cupboard. Thinking back, I don't recognise myself. My colleagues did not know. My bosses did not know. And I wasn't only hiding it from them. Somewhere in my own head, if nobody at work knew, it wasn't quite happening. I had decided it was a weakness, and that if it got out it would hold me back. Frankly, at the time I would have given anything to stuff my Crohn's diagnosis into that cleaning cupboard and shut the door for good. Instead I climbed in there with it, along with my mobile, laptop and drip. It took a global pandemic to stop me. In lockdown, like everyone, I rested under duress. I stayed home. No client meetings, no late nights, no drinks after work, no travelling. And I noticed something I had been too busy to notice: when my life was calmer, I was well. Genuinely well. I should add that my newfound status of "extremely vulnerable" helped me to put things into perspective. Although I had to laugh when the NHS texted me specifically to say I had to stay home, but that I could crack a window if I absolutely needed to get some air. Then restrictions relaxed, and the by-product was the working from home phenomenon. Two or three days remote became mandatory, to keep the team well. What was keeping the team well was, ironically, exactly what let me look after a serious illness. I could work from home after an infusion. I could nap at lunch. And my work didn't suffer. It improved.A few years later, when I had started to take my health seriously, I found the other thing I had cut. And by then it was at risk, precisely because I had spent years not looking after myself. That is the part I would want anyone still hiding something to hear. The years I spent working through infusions and pretending I was fine were not free. Crohn's does not care whether your colleagues know about it. It goes on doing what it does while you manage the optics, and when I finally started thinking about a family, the bill for all that editing arrived. I had wanted a family for a long time. Somewhere along the way I had decided it wasn't available to me, or that if it was, it was at the expense of my career. Early on, a colleague pointed out that the women who made managing director either didn't have children or had husbands who didn't work. It wasn't said as a warning. It was an observation, offered lightly. I absorbed it completely. And the women I looked up to didn't have children either. So I quietly removed the option, and then arranged my life around a choice I didn't know I had made. Writing this now, I realise I have no idea why my mentors didn't have children. It never seemed like something you could ask. I wonder how they would have answered, and whether there would have been redacted parts. That is the thing about life editing. You don't experience it as dishonesty. You experience it as being professional. Easy to work with. Not making a fuss. Yoshino called it: "be who you are, but don't make it anybody's problem." Here is the uncomfortable part. Life editing is a strategy many people genuinely need to deploy. Holding off a week or two before you tell your boss you're pregnant, until the promotion is signed off, is inauthentic but realistic. I don't like it and I don't agree with it, but let's be real. We still have to do it. So every individual edit is sensible. Understandable. Sometimes necessary, because the cost of telling the truth is real and women are not imagining it. But look at what gets cut. It usually falls into the same category of thing: illness, fertility, grief, exhaustion, children, need. The things that make you a person rather than a resource. The risk isn't any single edit. It's what the edits are protecting. You want to be well in spite of an illness, so you hide the illness. You want a family, so you hide the wanting. Eventually you have edited so much that you lose track of which version is the real one. It's like telling a lie often enough that it starts to feel true. That's the point where it stops being strategy and starts being incongruent with who you actually are. One day I didn't edit myself. I was ten weeks pregnant and there had just been a reshuffle at work. I had been moved into a new mostly male team, reporting to someone I barely knew. I had already made it clear upstairs how unhappy I was about the move, so when I put a meeting in his diary I am fairly sure he thought I was about to resign. Every instinct told me: say nothing. Get through the first trimester. Spend the next nine months building credibility. That is the best strategy here. Instead I sat directly across from him and told him I was ten weeks pregnant, and that it was a high risk pregnancy because of my Crohn's disease. I want to be clear about what I was handing over in that room. Not just news. The illness I had spent six years keeping out of every meeting, and the fact that it now had a say in whether this pregnancy went well. He did his best to mumble out a congratulations. I don't remember what he actually said, because I had stopped listening. I was free. I had finally put my truth first, and I did it for me and my baby. I had always hated the whole wait until twelve weeks rule anyway, and I knew in that moment I had to be honest about all of it. Take me or leave me. I'm well now. I have my son. I no longer take work calls from a hospital chair. In the end I left the industry. Telling the truth once didn't change the shape of the thing, it just meant I could finally see it clearly. I could just about bear my chronic illness being a mark against me, but I wasn't willing to spend the next decade wondering whether motherhood would be added to it. So I rearranged my life to do something on my own terms. I haven't stopped editing, mind you. I catch myself doing smaller versions of it constantly. Saying I'm fine. Not mentioning the appointment. Making the hard bit sound like an anecdote. Recovering, not recovered. What's changed is that I notice. And when I notice, I try to say the truer version instead. So I will ask you the question I did not think to ask my mentors. What have you cut? And who decided it had to go? Which is really why Gentle Space exists. Not as a platform, or a product. As somewhere to put the unedited version, anonymously if that's what it takes, because the full sentence has to go somewhere. Mum's the word, they've been saying since Shakespeare's day, meaning keep it quiet. I'd like it to mean something else now. Clare Unedited, for once. ## Sources - [Citation: Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigma:_Notes_on_the_Management_of_Spoiled_Identity) - [Yoshino, K. (2006). Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. Random House.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covering:_The_Hidden_Assault_on_Our_Civil_Rights) - [BBC Radio 4, Woman's Hour, August 2026 — Eshita Kabra on the culture of life editing. URL:](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0030118) ## If things feel very dark right now If things feel very dark right now, you don't have to wait. These lines are free and confidential. - **Samaritans** — 116 123 — Free, confidential, 24/7. - **PANDAS Foundation** — pandasfoundation.org.uk — Perinatal mental health support, via WhatsApp and callback. - **CALM** — 0800 58 58 58 — Support for anyone in crisis.