KM

A never-ending story...

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Where Did I Go?

I had a lovely time chatting with Dani Bell on her new podcast about motherhood, Where Did I Go?

We discussed what it means to find your creativity through motherhood, and why we need to reframe parenthood as something that expands our potential—not restrict it.

You can find the podcast on any of your preferred streamers, including Apple and Spotify.

Happy listening!

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The secrets to a good life at home

The 2022 edition of the annual IKEA Life at Home Report has landed, and it has some fascinating things to say about how people across the gl

Loved being interviewed for this lovely piece about a few secrets for a good life at home...!

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IKEA Life at Home Report x Annie Leibovitz

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A collaboration with Annie Leibovitz

I can scarcely believe I am writing these words... but I’m collaborating with the renowned American photographer, Annie Leibovitz, on a portrait series inspired by our latest Life at Home Report. 

One of the provocations for this new Artist in Residence initiative, is the fact that 48% of people say that they don’t see their life at home reflected in the media. So Annie will be visiting seven countries to dig into life at home as it really is for millions of people around the world, exploring our insights topics including identity, space and treasured possessions, and what’s driving our biggest concerns and frustrations.

You can read more here: https://lifeathome.ikea.com/blog/annie-leibovitz-life-at-home/

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We made a Life at Home zine!

I’ve loved having the chance to play with storytelling formats as we’ve explored how to share our life at home insights in more playful ways. The zine is our second instalment of the Life at Home Magazine, and you can read all the articles online too.

This zine pack contains a fold-out poster, stickers, a postcard and the zine itself, and we worked with fantastic creatives - including the brilliant illustrator Gabriel Hollington who’s done work for Vans and the New York Times - from brief to print.

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Make Yourself At Home

The latest IKEA Life at Home Report is out, and this year it’s all about identity in the home. Did you know that only 6 in 10 people, globally, feel that their home is a reflection of themselves? And that people who see their identity on display at home are almost twice as likely to see their home as a source of wellbeing?

As ever, it was a privilege and a joy to steer this latest research - every time we dig into life at home around the world, I learn so much more about my very own. I loved some of the stats around our quirkiest behaviours: those who hide from people at home, talk to themselves or their plants, or snoop in people’s private things... I think they point to some deep need for privacy, nurture and curiosity, which really connects us all.

You can read all the latest findings here: https://lifeathome.ikea.com

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Life at Home Magazine, Issue 01

I don't think I can convey quite how thrilled I am to launch the very first Life at Home Magazine for IKEA...! After a year in the thinking, we got it from idea to print in just three months, thanks to a wildly talented and committed team of editors, writers, photographers, creatives, illustrators, project managers and so many more. 

It was an honour to take on the role of Editor-in-Chief for this inaugural publication - you can find my Editor’s Letter on page one, sharing a little bit more about why this has been such a passion project for me.

Read the first issue here.

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Ingrid Reumert and Katie McCrory on Health

Key headlines from VELUX Healthy Home Barometer & IKEA Life at Home Report 2021 Ingrid Reumert, VP Sustainability Katie McCrory, Communications Lead, IKEA Life…

I was thrilled to present the latest findings from the IKEA Life at Home Report at the Velux Build For Life Conference 2021, to expand on our core insight that the way we feel about home shapes the way we feel about ourselves.

Check out the video to learn more about the five emotional needs of home, and why they are as important as the bricks and mortar we use to build the homes of the future.

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Table Talk: Does mental wellbeing start at home?

RECORDED EVENT: To launch the IKEA Life at Home Report 2021, we explored the intimate relationship between our homes and our mental health through a live stu...

A joy and a delighted to host our first IKEA Table Talk on Life at Home - I was joined by a warm group of experts, including Chief Creative Officer for IKEA, Marcus Engman, and writer and TV presenter Michelle Ogundehin, to discuss whether our home space is really doing the best it can for our headspace.

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Balance Starts At Home

The latest IKEA Life at Home Report is out! 

The last 12 months have been challenging for many of us. As many as 27% of the 34,000+ people we surveyed tell us that their mental health has suffered.

At the same time, 40% who felt more positive towards their home also saw a positive impact on their mental health. So we know our homes can help protect our mental wellbeing.

The key is achieving balance – in our relationships, our spaces, our communities and our rituals.

Check out the latest report to see what this means for us all.

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Record-breaking Bunnies and Messages from Beyond

I was skimming the Guardian headlines over a break between emails and thinking this morning, and landed on an article about the ‘world’s biggest rabbit’ being stolen from its home in Worcestershire. There’s a photo of the record-breaking bunny at the top of the piece, being stretched out from hip to pit by its proud owner, like she’s offering a furry snake to the viewer. Amongst the breaking news about clashes in the US over an(other) unlawful killing of a(nother) young black man, and the rolling cycle of hype and hope around Covid vaccinations, it’s a strangely sad story that provokes a kind of humorous pity compared to the systemic grief of our pandemic lives. But it caught my attention for other reasons. 

When I was 22, I took a one-way flight to New York to work as an intern for a theatre producer, having met him for all of five minutes before I brazenly asked for a job. It’s a story that becomes almost mythical in the habitual retelling, as the details flatten into something that appears braver, crazier, and wilder than I actually remember it being in the moment. But we all have experiences - or people - in our lives that push our narrative arc towards our eventual becoming. Paul was one of mine. 

Paul and I worked in his 40 square metre studio apartment on the Lower East Side, sitting side-by-side on a long mahogany desk at the foot of his bed. It was incessantly noisy, as only New York streetscapes are, with the wail of police cars and clamour and clatter of everyday life playing out of the window. As if to compete with the din, Paul was an avid conversationalist with a reach to his voice that could carry through brick walls. He was also a beautiful singer, often packing up sheet music in his all-terrain rucksack and taking me to piano bars in Hell’s Kitchen when the day was through, where he’d command the accompanist and the stage. So conversations over and around work, as we sat with our laptops open on his desk, were always free-flowing and peppered with his full-throttled laugh. Give him a lead, and it was not uncommon for him to break into song. I’ve never worked with anyone else who took to their working day with such delight.

One day, I was browsing the BBC news page and spotted an article about a new record-breaking rabbit. In the picture, the owner was holding him up like an overgrown toddler, legs hanging down to the floor as her arms hooked him around his chest. It had the extraordinary effect of giving him several chins as his furry girth piled up around his neck and quivering whiskers. He had, appropriately, just been awarded the Guinness World Record for his notable size. I pointed him out to Paul, who promptly disabused me of my naivety and quipped that it must be a fake; no rabbit could EVER be that large. “But it’s the BBC!” I shot back, appalled at the prospect that he believed such a prominent news institution could ever be caught up in some bunny deep-fakery. He wasn’t having any of it. We playfully goaded one another for the rest of the morning, bursting into laughter whenever we looked at the picture. It became an in-joke before long; at one point I printed the picture out and left it on his pillow. That bloody rabbit, he’d say, mimicking my pointed British accent, and then laugh like a drain. 

My friendship with Paul ran a glorious 15 or so years, until he died last year of brain cancer. His last message to me was on the day I went into labour with my daughter, as we both found ourselves in hospitals earlier than we thought we would. Over the years, I’d seen him as much as time and money could allow, finding ways to get to New York for pleasure or work. Our last get together was at the start of martini season, as he had joyfully declared it, so we drank several coupes of the stuff on a downtown rooftop and spat out our olive stones over the side. Paul was profoundly sentimental, but carried a dark comic streak which always lifted out the lightness in sad or hard situations. A month or so after he passed away, I got an automated ‘memory’ on my phone - the ones that present a photo and throw you into some nostalgic tailspin in the middle of the day. Anyway, this particular memory was a photo of Paul and I on the rooftop, martinis in hand, but it was being shared with me on Halloween. I could almost hear Paul laughing his head off at the naff gothic comedy of it all. What a cheesy day to come back from the dead.  

It hardly needs saying that the pandemic has shaped many lives in many ways, my own included. To lose a friend as special as Paul in the middle of it has been one of the harder moments for me. All told, I have struggled to find myself in the soup that has emerged from becoming a parent during a pandemic, returning to work but remotely, navigating multiple lockdowns, and being away from family and friends for such a long period of time. Sitting at a desk because there is nowhere else to be. It has made me profoundly question what I do and why I do it. 

Hunched over my phone this morning, looking at the picture of this absurd rabbit, I thought of Paul. “Look!” I wanted to say to him, “this has to be a real rabbit!”. I wanted to know if he’s still a bunny conspiracy theorist, or if the years had softened him to the wild extremes of nature. But I guess what I really wanted was to go back, for just a brief moment, to trade stories over our laptops above the din outside, with all the potential of my becoming ahead of me. I’m not wooh-wooh about this kind of stuff, usually, but I do think the cosmos throws things out every now and then that meet you right when you need them. I needed to remember my friend today, as a way to think through the bigger and harder stuff that has kept me awake at night these past weeks, and filled me with inertia at my desk. It has made me reach back to moments when I took to my working day with such delight, just as Paul always did. To start with that feeling, and go from there. To remind myself that eight hours at a computer is a long time without breaking into song at least once.

I guess the answers to life’s problems come in all shapes and sizes. But who knew it would be that bloody rabbit, Paul? 

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The Ambiguous Losses of 2020

If, like me, you are prone to a little reflection during this particularly sparse bit of the calendar, when Christmas has ended and nothing else has begun – the armpit of the year, as I recently heard it described – then 2020 really begs the question: where the fuck do I begin?

It’s tempting to try and frame this raging dumpster fire of a year in a way that pulls out the positives; but I know of too many people with too much heartache to condescend in that way. Take what you can, only if you can, and put the rest on the bonfire. Instead, I’ve been circling back to something I learned about earlier this year, whilst listening to a Brené Brown podcast on one of my daily marches around the reservoir with Órla lashed to me. It’s the idea of “ambiguous loss”.

All of us experience loss of many shades throughout our lives, and for the most part we can point to the cause of the pain – what was once there and no longer is – and work through our grief in a coherent way. Ambiguous loss is when we lack the facts of the losing, or the loss just doesn’t make sense; and it’s relational, so in a therapy setting it’s used to help treat people who have lost a loved one, either physically or psychologically. A family member going missing, or developing Alzheimers, can produce catastrophic feelings of ambiguous loss, for example.

On this podcast episode, the discussion around ambiguous loss opened up to address the kinds of experiences millions of us have had during 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic. Many – too many – have experienced loss that you can find a Hallmark card to commiserate with; but many more have sat with grief that often defies categorisation. I think of this kind of loss as being the “should’ve, could’ve, would’ve” variety. The people who could’ve gotten the grades for the University they desperately wanted to go to; the people who would’ve been saying their “I dos” in front of family and friends; the people who should’ve been spending the holidays with family, rather than entirely on their own. The things we would be doing, if it weren’t for a pandemic. Something inside me flickered with recognition.

Ambiguous loss was the first time I felt I had a way to talk about my experience of the preceding months. I gave birth to my daughter four weeks before Denmark (where I live) went into national lockdown in March of this year. She had been years in the making and arrived a month too early after a birth that went substantially outside of the plan, leaving me wrestling with this slippery feeling about how things had gone. Hell, you don’t need to have a baby during a pandemic to wrestle with ambiguous loss; the entire experience of becoming a parent in any situation is measured out by what you’re expecting and what you actually get. The ambiguity lies in what you know you’re wildly grateful for – health and happiness – and what you still feel you’ve been denied.

I was new to motherhood, so I had no benchmark for normal or reasonable, but I couldn’t shake this feeling that what I was going through was filled with should’ve, could’ve, would’ves thanks to the pandemic. My parents would’ve been able to visit their first grandchild before she turned six months old. I should’ve had health visitors keeping tabs on my baby’s weight gain and flagging the tongue tie it took us four months to diagnose after weeks and weeks of constant screaming. I could’ve seen friends and met with a local mothers’ group for comfort and support when I was at my wits end. When we fervently practice gratitude – which I do, in the absence of any spirituality – we don’t always allow ourselves the space to grieve the ambiguous losses we also sit with.

If life is forward momentum, then 2020 has felt like cosmic stasis. We create meaning for the passage of time through milestones and events that tether us to shared cultural experiences by being physically together. I think about the missed proms, graduations, weddings, dates, jobs, families. I think about people who have been forced to pause fertility treatments, operations, therapy, education, work and training. I think about the people who spent their birthdays and Hen Dos and weddings and christenings and bar mitzvahs and Eid and Christmas with the people they love the very most on a video screen. I think about the people starting new jobs without meeting any of their co-workers. I think about the women who had to give birth without their partners in the delivery room. I think about the grandparents living in Care Homes who haven’t hugged a single family member since the pandemic began. I don’t think they make Hallmark cards for these things.

Understanding what ambiguous loss can feel like helped me work through a big pile of emotional crap I’d been burying with regards to my return to work in October, when my daughter was eight months old. I was ready and excited to get back to work, but when I thought about the practicalities something resembling anger washed over me. I wasn’t actually “returning to work” because my company was rightly urging all of us to work from home wherever possible. I couldn’t even return to a desk, because our home office was now a nursery and my desk was locked away in the basement. I’d already gone on maternity leave without so much as a goodbye after my waters broke one random Wednesday night, and now I was returning without so much as a hello. No hugs from much-missed co-workers, no gossip over lunch, no impractical heels and dangly earrings and overpriced coffee-to-go on the train as I shapeshift from Mother Mode into Professional Mode, ready to get shit done.

So when people ask how it’s been finishing up with maternity leave, I tell them the truth: pretty crap, overall. Not because I miss my baby, which people dolefully ask with that patronising head tilt, but because I miss actually being at work. The loss lies in the reality meeting none of my expectations. The ambiguity lies in knowing that making this kind of whimpering complaint makes me sound like an entitled arsehole; grief cannot possibly co-exist with the layers of privilege that affords me paid maternity leave and stable, safe and dignified employment to begin with. So let me say, once again, that when we fervently practice gratitude, we don’t always allow ourselves the space to grieve the ambiguous losses we also feel. It has to be both/and, not either/or. I’m really grateful to return to work and it’s been a complete shit-show.

So this New Year, if you find yourself wrestling with that slippery feeling as you try and place your individual misery in the context of all those who’ve suffered more, I urge you to find the time to grieve all your ambiguous losses. For all the things you have done, take a moment to accept the things you haven’t. For all the intentions well made, find the space to hold the plans and dreams that didn’t manifest this year. If you need permission, let this be the slip that gets you out of Stoicism 101, and lets you feel desperately sad about the silly but meaningful stuff you thought you’d be doing. Consider this the Hallmark card that says “I’m sorry Fresher’s Week was a total bust” or “Congratulations on your marriage even if you cried on your Zoom wedding day!” or “It’s definitely not the best of circumstances to start a new job!”.

And then throw it into the rest of the burning trash that is 2020.

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The Big Home Reboot

Sharing the major insights from the latest IKEA Life at Home Report

Check out the launch film for the IKEA Life at Home Report 2020, where I share some of the major insights alongside experts from around the world.

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IKEA Life at Home Report 2019

Each year, we get a little bit closer to understanding what people need from their home.

In 2018, something caught our eye. Privacy is one of the most important needs for creating the feeling of home, but one in four people, globally, find other places better able to fulfill this need than their own home.

So this year we dived into privacy, to explore its importance in providing a better everyday life at home.

Check out the link to read more about what privacy can do for you - and how it can transform your life at home.

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A new Ikea report is an unsettling look at life in the 21st century

“Almost half of Americans (45%) go to their car to have a private moment to themselves,” the company reports in a new survey of 22,000 people in 22 countries.

If you’ve not wrapped your eyeballs around the IKEA Life at Home Report before, here’s a great piece in FastCo which lands all the key insights from the 2018 report in a smart way. It’s a joy and a privilege to lead this outstanding annual report, and witness firsthand how life at home influences life at large.

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Life at Home Report 2018

Meet Greta - she’s a hoola-hooping 80 year old with a technicolour life. She helped me understand that life at home doesn’t just take place indoors but that it exists beyond four walls too.

Here is the IKEA Life at Home Report 2018 - I’ve been working on this for a year, and I am THRILLED with the insights and stories. Did you know that one in three people say they feel more at home in places other than where they live? Check out this short report for more, and get to know glorious Greta.

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Bananagrams 4 lyfe

A thought. What if Bananagrams is an allegory for life? Bear with me. If you haven’t played this highly addictive word game, then can I suggest you immediately remedy this at your local games purveyor, call your most patient friends, and pour a large one.

But here’s the premise. You pick a load of lettered tiles at random and try to arrange them all into one coherent word grid. Left-to-right, up-and-down. It’s like Scrabble, but without the board. No acronyms, no proper nouns, no bullshit (although you can actually have ‘bullshit’, because it’s not an acronym or a proper noun). From the moment one of you lets out a hearty “SPLIIIIIT” and you all furiously turn over those tiny tiles with your greasy fingers, you’re on your own, my friend. Making words out of letters, sense out of disorder, patterns out of chaos, meaning out of life. 

As you dither over an erroneous H, you look up fleetingly to spot your neighbour agonising over three Xs and a Q but no U, or laddering up some eight-lettered thing of beauty, or snorting at a gleefully placed ‘fuck’ or ‘fanny’. Everyone in their own word-worlds. All wrestling with the same delights and nightmares that the tipping point of too many vowels or consonants can bring from the bunch.

And then suddenly – you can see the way forward. You can scarcely believe the Gods have handed you this gift of a perfect grid, the words beaming up at you as you inwardly rejoice at your unparalleled talents at making four-letter words in formation. And then you know what happens next? Everyone has to take a new letter, at random, and fit it in with the rest. And again. And again. Until all the tiles are gone. In short, every time you find a place and meaning for everything, you just go and fuck it up by bringing something totally unforeseen into the mix. It’s a race to use all the tiles, to create meaning in the time you have available, and be the first to raise your fist high and exclaim ‘BANANAAAAAAAS!’

Sound familiar?

This is where the rules of engagement get interesting. I have found that players are divided into three camps. Faced with a letter that doesn’t fit, you only have a few options. You can trade it in, but pay the price of taking three more back; you can sit there holding out, until someone else triggers the grab for a new tile; or you can break up your grid and start over.

For the Traders, it’s clear they live life in endless negotiation, hedging their bets and hoping for a better result on the slimmest of margins. And for the Ditherers, life is what happens when you spend most of your time waiting for someone else to make a move. But the Start-Overs… They’re the outliers. These are the people with the capacity to look at a well-ordered life and know that there is room for more if you are brave enough to shake it up.

The first time I played Bananagrams as an adult, it left me slightly breathless. I didn’t feel like I was playing a game – I felt like I was watching the compound impact of a lifetime of actions. I had recently moved to a new city, in a new country, for a reason that usually required someone to pull up a chair for me to explain properly. Just months before, I had looked at my well-ordered life and realised there was room for more if only I were brave enough to shake it up. But what if I had traded, instead? What if I had dithered just that bit longer? What are the words I could have crafted in another life?

I routinely challenge people to Bananagrams, these days. I like to think I’m a fearless Start-Over, no matter the circumstances, but the truth is that I dabble in a bit of trading, and sometimes there is comfort in biding your time and waiting for someone else to make a move. Of course, the real joy is witnessing the struggles and triumphs of those you’ve managed to coerce around a table to wrestle with the equivalent of a shattered dictionary, and taking delight in some of the remarkable words that people conjure up. I learned what a ‘chode’ is last week, so there’s always an education to be had.

If you’re looking for sense and meaning in a life that is well-ordered or not, I feel quite certain that all of life can be found in those 144 lettered tiles.