The longer story

I write about what it means to be human.

Not the polished version. The actual one. The person who says yes to the hike they have no intention of enjoying, who confuses being wanted with being known, who has done all the right things and still goes home feeling one step outside the thing everyone else seems to have. My books sit with that person, because for a long time that person was me.

I grew up in South Africa and trained as a Registered Counsellor, with further study in addiction care, behavioural science, sexology and gender studies. For years I thought of that training as the work. Now I think of it as the ground beneath it. A move to Switzerland, where I now live, reshaped almost everything, and somewhere in that recalibration I stopped wanting to explain people and started wanting to understand them, myself included.

I am careful with titles. I am not a psychologist, and I do not write as one. What I am is someone who reads widely, watches closely, and writes to make sense of the patterns most of us carry without naming them: loneliness, dating, boundaries, belonging, identity, and the daily arithmetic of trying to be close to another person.

My first book, Swiping for Something Real, is about modern dating and loneliness, and about a question most dating advice skips: what if the problem was never how hard you were trying? It carries a particular resonance for readers who have had to navigate a world that was not quite built for them, though the door is open to anyone trying to be human.

What I care about, underneath all of it, is understanding over information. I would rather help you think clearly than hand you a rule, and I would rather write something true and unhurried than something clever. I hold compassion and accountability together, because understanding a struggle has never meant letting ourselves off the hook.

There are a few things I have come to believe and keep returning to. That readiness is largely a myth, and willingness is the truer measure. That being single is a full season of life, not a waiting room. And that a great many of the struggles we have blamed on personal failure are, more often, understandable responses to being human.

If that is the kind of company you are after, you are in the right place.