There is a basket of laundry on the stairs that has been there so long it has rendered you blind. You step over it on the way to bed. You have in fact been stepping over it for eleven days now, and somewhere beneath the towels and the socks and the tiny daily failures you stopped having the energy to name, a part of you is still in there too, folded small.
So I want to make you a proposal.
This isn’t a challenge in the punishing sense. Not the optimised-woman thing, where you arrive at the end smaller and more palatable, and still, somehow, not quite enough for whoever it is you imagine is keeping score…
Something else entirely. Seventy-five days of keeping yourself.
You will have heard of the other one. The 75Hard one. The one with the macros and the two workouts and the progress photo in the unforgiving bathroom light. I have borrowed its bones and thrown out its soul. We are keeping the structure, because structure is how a tired woman builds momentum without having to feel motivated first. But we are burning the rest at dawn.
Because I do not want to be smaller. (Well, I do, but not in a way that reduces me)
And I don’t want you to feel like you have got to make yourself smaller. I don’t want us standing in bathrooms documenting our own misery under a light fitting that has never loved a woman in its life.
I want something richer. Stranger. More useful and more beautiful…
I want seventy-five days of returning to the house. To the body. To the page. To the plate. To the nervous system. To the little flame inside you that has been coughing politely from under a pile of receipts, resentment and unopened post.
Here is what seventy-five days actually buys you.
Not a new life. (I am deeply suspicious of “new lives” because they tend to arrive via impossibly glossy women, with ring lights and a payment plan ad I’m afraid I can’t be she). But instead, a life put gently back into your own hands.
A house that has started, quietly, to hug you again.
A body fed like something beloved rather than managed like a problem.
A page kept.
A nervous system spoken to in a kinder voice than the one it is used to.
And the slow, almost embarrassing return of a woman you had filed under later.
Later, when the house is sorted.
Later, when you are thinner.
Later, when you are less tired.
Later, when money is better.
Later, when everyone else has stopped needing something from you.
Later, when you are the sort of woman who can be trusted with linen napkins, morning pages, a clean fridge and an inner life.
No!
We are going to start before later. We are going to start in the middle of it
With the basket on the stairs.
With the kitchen in a mood.
With the body hot and cross and under-slept.
With the bank account doing interpretive dance.
With the phone pinging like a deranged stalker.
With the good mug, the bad bra, the book we keep meaning to read, the drawer of shame, the flowers we did not buy because who do we think we are?
We start there.
What the Brocante 75 is
The Brocante 75 is a 75-day devotion to home and the woman who keeps it.
It’s not a diet, definitely not a productivity challenge, instead it is a daily practice of tending your actual life, not the fantasy one in which you wake at 5am, drink green things, never lose your temper, and own matching storage containers for every dry good known to woman
For seventy-five days, we will keep five small devotions.
Small enough to do on a difficult day.
Strong enough create the tiniest shifts in atmosphere
Beautiful enough to make the whole thing feel less like self-improvement and more like a quiet domestic uprising.
The Five Daily Devotions
1. Tend the House for Twenty Minutes
Not the whole house. God help us, no.
One surface. One basket. One drawer. The sink. The bedside table. The chair currently dressed as a jumble sale. The hallway that smells a bit dodgy. The kitchen counter. The little corner that mutters at you each time you walk past it.
Twenty minutes. Then stop.
This bit matters. We are not cleaning ourselves into collapse and calling it virtue. We are teaching the house that we are coming back, and teaching ourselves that we do not have to destroy our nervous system in order to deserve a clean surface.
2. Feed Yourself Like Someone Beloved
Once a day, you will feed yourself on purpose.
Not standing at the counter like a rabid raccoon. Not finishing crusts and calling it lunch. Not living on coffee, crumbs and the peculiar rage of four o’clock.
A plate. A bowl. A cup you actually like. Soup counts. Toast counts. A boiled egg with proper soldiers counts magnificently. A baked potato. A messy peach. Porridge with brown sugar. Cheese and crackers arranged as if you are your own guest.
Because his isn’t about diet. It is about feeding your hunger with grace and getly shifting the way you feed yourself to something with more ritual.
3. Make One Inch of Beauty
Every day, one deliberate act of beauty.
Tiny is fine. Tiny is probably best.
A flower in a jam jar. A candle lit before you have earned it. The lamp instead of the overhead light that makes everyone look recently arrested. The good perfume on a Tuesday. A clean tea towel. A ribbon on a basket. A book left open on the arm of a chair like evidence of civilisation.
Beauty is not what is left over after the important things are done. Beauty is one of the things that makes the important things bearable.
4. Keep the Page
Ten minutes of reading or writing. That is all.
Read a chapter. Copy a sentence. Keep a commonplace book. Write three diary lines. Make a list. Write a letter you may or may not send. Annotate a poem in the bath. Tell the truth in a notebook with a cover you consider too pretty for your current level of chaos.
A woman who keeps a page keeps a self.
5. Tend the Nerve
Every day, you will do one thing that tells your nervous system it is not being hunted by wolves, emails, laundry, patriarchy, the group chat, menopause or the price of butter.
This might be a walk.
It might be ten minutes of yoga.
It might be lying flat on the kitchen floor while the kettle does its work.
It might be legs up the wall.
It might be music.
It might be sitting in the garden with no phone.
It might be sweeping the path dramatically, like a Victorian widow working something out.
The point is not exercise.
The point is regulation.
The point is saying to the body, darling, I know. Come here.
****
And Then, One Sentence of Truth
Each day, after the five devotions, you will write one honest sentence.
Not a gratitude list, though gratitude may arrive if it has the manners.
A truth.
Today I wanted to disappear, but I folded the towels.
The kitchen looked like a crime scene and the roses were magnificent anyway.
I did not fix my life today. I lit a candle in it.
I ate lunch sitting down and felt weirdly emotional, which frankly seems excessive, but there we are.
The house is not the problem. The problem is that I have been trying to live without being held.
One sentence.
That is enough. Enough is a muscle. So we are going to build it.
*******
The Repair Clause
Now listen carefully, because this is the heart of the whole thing…
You can’t fail here: you repair, you return.
I know your lives. You are perimenopausal or well past it. Some of you are grieving. Most of you are caring for somebody in oe way or another. A good number of you are neurodivergent and exhausted by a world built for people who are not. Nearly all of you are living in houses where the tumble dryer has quietly become a second religion.
So there is a rule, and it is the most important rule.
Miss a devotion and you do not start the whole thing again like their is penance to pay to the God of BrocanteHome.
You have twenty-four hours to perform a small repair.
Make tea. Sit down. Write one honest sentence about what happened. Do the tiniest possible version of the thing you missed.
Then carry on.
Because this was never about never falling off.
The power is in becoming a woman who returns.
Not once, dramatically, with new stationery and a terrifying plan.
Again and again. Gently and stubbornly.
With toast if necessary, or a quick scream into the nearest pillow if that’s the way the day is going…
How It Will Work
The Brocante 75 will run for ten weeks and five days.
Each week has a theme, and together we will move through the house and the self, from the clearing of the doom piles in week one to the woman you have become by day seventy-five.
We begin with the surface that shames us.
Then the hearth.
Then the body in the house.
Then beauty.
Then the page.
Then the nervous system.
Then the social hearth.
Then the money and meaning cupboard.
Then ritual.
Then return.
Each week, my paid subscribers will receive a full Brocante 75 post from me, part essay, part ritual manual, part practical companion, part domestic sermon from a woman standing in the kitchen she hasn’t got, with a candle, a notebook, and a raised eyebrow.
There will be printable pages.
Devotion cards.
Reflection prompts.
Tiny rebellions.
Milestone badges.
Substack notes prompts.
A little ceremony here and there, because frankly life is hard enough without making everything look like a spreadsheet in a strop.
What My Paid Subscribers Will Receive
When Brocante75 starts in a week or two, BrocateHome subscribers will receive:
The Brocante 75 starter pack
A printable introduction to the whole project, including the five devotions, the Repair Clause, your 75-day tracker, and a little manifesto to pin somewhere visible.
Ten weekly essays and devotion posts
One for each stage of the journey, lush, practical, tender, funny, cross in the right places, and not remotely interested in turning you into a beige woman with a water bottle.
Weekly printable packets
Trackers, reflection sheets, ritual cards, devotion pages, tiny rebellion prompts, and domestic maps to help you bring the week into your actual house.
Milestone badges
Keeper of the Kettle. Mistress of the Surface. Patron Saint of Returning. Defender of the Good Mug. The Woman with a Rhythm. Domestic Revolutionary. Keeper of Herself.
Not gold stars.
Archetypes.
Obviously.
The closing ribbon ceremony
A final post and printable reflection for day seventy-five, so we do not simply stagger over the finish line and wander off. We tie the ribbon. Choose what stays. Decide what kind of woman we are becoming…
Who Is This For?
This is for you if you are tired of abandoning yourself.
If your house feels like it is shouting.
If your body is screechig and you are trying, not always gracefully, to listen.
If you are sick of self-improvement that begins from the assumption that you are a problem.
If you crave rhythm but rebel against routine.
If you want beauty, but not the sickly kind.
If you want discipline, but not punishment.
If you want a home that can hold a real woman, not a performance of one.
If you have a drawer you fear.
If you have a mug you are saving for guests.
If you have forgotten what you like to eat when nobody else is asking.
If you miss the page.
If you are lonely in a house full of things.
If you are ready to begin again without making a whole operatic production out of it.
Though naturally, if you wish to make a whole operatic production out of it, I will support you. I am not a monster.
What this is not
Like all things at BrocanteHome it is not about becoming perfect.
Perfect is brittle.
Perfect is boring.
Perfect has never once remembered to defrost the chicken.
So this isn’t about before-and-after photographs. There will be no shame theatre here. No one will be asked to present their life as a disgusting prelude to a more acceptable after…
This is not about doing all five devotions beautifully every day.
Some days your twenty minutes will be magnificent.
Some days your twenty minutes will be moving a pile from one side of the room to the other while muttering darkly about everyone you have ever loved.
Fine.
Some days your beloved plate will be soup with parsley.
Some days it will be toast eaten sitting down with enough butter to restore your faith in humanity.
Fine.
Some days your page will be an exquisite paragraph.
Some days it will say, I cannot bear these people today.
Also fine.
Truth is often gloriously messy, don’t you know?
The Invitation
So here it is.
Seventy-five days.
Five devotions a day.
One sentence of truth.
A house slowly brought back into conversation.
A body fed.
A page kept.
A nervous system tended.
An inch of beauty made, on purpose, even when the day has been rude.
And a woman, you, returning to herself without apology.
The basket is still on the stairs.
We start there.
Come and keep yourself with me.
Become a paid subscriber to join The Brocante 75 and receive the starter pack, weekly essays, printable devotion packets, community threads, daily prompts and the full seventy-five day journey when we begin…
The Brocante 75 begins on Monday 15th June
Bring a notebook. Go journal shopping if that’s what it takes to make you feel committed. Use the good mug.
We are not becoming better women.
We are simply committing to looking after ourselves.
Wait! I’ve Got a Special Offer For You!
Choose or upgrade to an annual subscription and get the whole year for $75.00 (approx) if you join before Brocante75 begins!
This could not have come at a more perfect time.
If only it were possible to make you the Prime Minister. What a different world this would be. ❤️