I should probably start by explaining the name.
I am indecisive.
Not about everything. Give me something important to decide and apparently I can manage it. Give me two perfectly acceptable options for dinner and suddenly we need further information, a pros and cons list and possibly an independent inquiry.
So: Maybes.
Mistress of Maybes actually began as an attempt to become slightly more anonymous on the internet. Given what happened next, that is quite funny.
In the summer of 2025, I was at a work event where we were playing one of those games in which you’re given a random subject and have to talk about it for a minute without hesitating, repeating yourself or filling the silence with “ummm”. My subject was something along the lines of becoming accidentally TikTok famous.
This was not entirely hypothetical.
A while earlier, I’d gone to Bali, posted some things on TikTok and somehow come home with around 3,000 followers. I talked about this during the game and then had the slightly alarming realisation that I had just announced to a collection of people I worked with that I had a TikTok account. My TikTok username at the time was also connected to the username I used elsewhere online. It wouldn’t have required the investigative resources of MI5 to find me.
So I changed it.
I wanted something that wasn’t my name, wasn’t connected to anything else I’d used online and couldn’t easily be traced back to me. Mistress of Maybes seemed appropriate. Partly because it sounded a little mysterious. Mostly because I can’t make a decision. And, importantly, it was available.
Finding an unused username on the internet in 2025 is approximately as easy as finding an affordable house in London, so the fact that nobody else had claimed three slightly ridiculous words in that particular order felt like a win.
At that point, I didn’t have a grand content strategy. (I still don’t.) The account was just going to be about my life: dating stories, food, the slightly peculiar experience of trying to make new friends in London after many of your existing ones have grown up and escaped, perhaps some books, perhaps some money stuff, and whatever other nonsense I happened to be doing. There were lots of maybes.
Then I found a lump.
And suddenly there was rather less ambiguity about what was going on in my life.
Talking to someone who didn’t exist yet
On the day I went to the hospital to get my results, I sat in the car park and talked to my phone. I hadn’t told anybody I was having tests. Outside the hospital, I was the only person in my life who knew that I was about to walk into a room and find out whether or not I had cancer. I think I turned the camera on because I needed to tell someone.
So I talked.
Then I went inside. I got my results. And I came back to the car and turned the camera on again.
I had cancer.
Those videos were never intended to be some carefully constructed beginning to a cancer series. For quite a long time, I wasn’t sure I would ever post them. They were raw and personal and difficult to watch back. They still make me cry, even now. But I kept recording. I recorded things throughout treatment, even though almost nobody was seeing them.
I had six months of chemotherapy and, for most of it, I went through the day-to-day bits by myself. That was largely my choice. My mum came to stay at the beginning until, after three weeks, I gently encouraged her to rediscover her own home. She returned later and I eventually encouraged her to rediscover it for a second time. I didn’t need looking after all the time. I could look after myself, and I didn’t want cancer to turn me into an invalid when I wasn’t one.
But wanting independence isn’t the same as never feeling lonely. And there were things I didn’t always want to put on the people closest to me. They would never have considered it a burden, but sometimes I did. Sometimes I just wanted somewhere to put the thoughts without worrying about how they would make somebody else feel.
So I talked to the camera.
Looking back, I think I was sharing what was happening with someone who didn’t exist yet.
The backlog from hell
In my head, I was going to post all of this on TikTok.
To be fair, I have recorded many things in my life that, in my head, I was going to post on TikTok. Most of them have never seen the light of day.
I have a slightly unfortunate habit of recording something, deciding I will definitely post it, thinking about posting it, overthinking posting it, becoming anxious about posting it and eventually resolving the problem by simply never posting it. I have perfected a content strategy in which the content exists but nobody is allowed to see it.
Cancer did not cure me of this. It did, however, give the problem three fairly significant additions. Firstly, editing TikToks takes approximately 900% longer than anyone who has never edited a TikTok would reasonably expect. Secondly, chemotherapy made me extremely tired. And thirdly, I simply wasn’t in the right mental space to take some of the most difficult moments of my life, edit them, put text over them, choose a jaunty font and offer them up to the internet for public consumption.
So I didn’t. I kept recording, though.
Which meant that while I was getting progressively less capable of editing anything, the amount of material waiting to be edited was becoming increasingly horrifying.
The fatigue was fatiguing. The anxiety was anxietying. The backlog was backlogging.
Eventually, after I finished chemotherapy, I started to feel a little more like myself again. And I realised it was probably now or never. If I waited another six months, these videos really would feel like ancient history. But if I started then, I could catch the story up while I was still living the next part of it: surgery, radiotherapy and whatever came afterwards.
So I finally posted the video from that hospital car park.
I expected what I usually expect from TikTok. About 200 views. I am a 200-view kind of girl. More than 200,000 people have now watched that video.
In the month since I started posting my cancer backlog, my videos have had over 750,000 views. Around 5,000 more people followed me. And, perhaps more surprisingly given that this is the internet, they have been overwhelmingly kind, engaged and supportive.
For months, I’d been talking to a camera as if somebody was listening. It turned out quite a lot of people eventually would.
So what is this place?
This isn’t a cancer website.
Cancer is part of it, obviously. At the moment it’s quite a large part. It has been spectacularly inconsiderate about taking up both my time and my content calendar.
But Mistress of Maybes existed before cancer. And I intend to exist after it.
I’m single, I live in London and I am permanently on the wrong side of 30. It’s a useful age: I can still be on the wrong side of 30 when I’m 40, 50, 60 or 70, so I see no reason to provide further updates.
I like food, books, travel, trying things, occasionally buying things I absolutely did not need, and embarking on projects with varying degrees of wisdom.
I’m still indecisive.
I’m still interested in far too many things.
And this is somewhere for all of them.
Some of what ends up here will be serious. Some of it might be useful. Some of it will exist purely because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Which, now that I think about it, is probably as good an explanation of Maybes as any.