Likeable summary

Cotton walked into the Radio 1 offices to find multiple faces suddenly finding their keyboards very interesting. Nobody met her eye. A horrible news story with a tenuous yet life-altering link to her was about to air – on her own show. Shame had moved in completely. It dictated how she walked, talked, dressed, slept, and whether she ate at all. “Don’t make eye contact,” it whispered. “Keep your mouth shut,” it said. She had over five million listeners to broadcast to in 40 minutes. She had nothing left.

Most of us know this feeling, even without a horror story attached. Shame isn’t the same as embarrassment. Embarrassment points to something you got wrong. Shame tells you that you are wrong – your internal voice cranked to full volume, your worst moments projected on a cinema screen. It swallows everything, keeps you frozen, and convinces you you’re the only one drowning in it.

Cotton, 22, is living her dream as her sneakers squeak their way through the curved corridors of BBC Television Centre – a building she’d spent her whole childhood longing to enter. But something’s off – moments ago, she was sick in her dressing room.

Nobody on set knows. A makeup artist checks her face, declares it perfect. The director’s voice comes through her earpiece: a few stray hairs on the left. She flattens them, draws her stomach in as the camera swings toward her – a reflex she barely registers anymore. On the outside she’s camera-ready, rehearsed, and primed. But on the inside she’s in the grips of bulimia, convinced that shrinking her body to match the pop stars she interviews will make her likeable. What she doesn’t yet know is that those pop stars feel exactly the same way.

Cotton was in her mid-twenties, about to present a prime-time NBC show in America – but the producer was wrecking her dream. First she had Cotton parading in and out of a boardroom trying on coat after coat, dismissing each one with a single syllable – no – eyes never leaving her phone. The night before, the same producer had taken her to a steakhouse – knowing full well that Cotton had been vegetarian since the age of ten – leaving her with nothing but fries while raw meat was brought to the table for the producer to select from. Every instinct told her to speak up. Instead, she smiled, kept quiet, and tried her best to be likeable. The result? The producer still didn’t like her.

Does any of this ring a bell? Saying nothing when everything in you wants to speak. Smiling when you want to scream. How often do you hold back what you really want to say because you’re worried about rocking the boat? How often do you say yes when every part of you means absolutely not? Keeping quiet feels safer in the moment. The cost, though, accumulates quietly – and it can go much further than you’d expect.

Cotton is 43, dancing in Ibiza under a sky the colour of forget-me-nots, hands in the air, eyes closed. Around her, sequins glisten, feet stomp, palms reach skyward. And inside her head, for the first time in years, the mental chatter has stopped. The loops have hushed. She’s just here, living big, without a thought for outside judgment. Friends come up and say she seems like a different person. One tells her she used to seem “uptight and fraught.” It stings to hear – but she knows it’s true.

How much have you shrunk yourself without even realizing? Not just physically – though that too – but in every direction. Never too loud, never too demanding, never drawing attention to the minimal space you occupy. Sitting where you’re put and calling it keeping the peace. Cotton’s image for it is perfect: a small pot plant, placed on a patio and left there. And as you age, the expectation only grows: fade quietly into the background, your work here apparently done.

Back in 1966, Yoko Ono created a ceiling panel with the word YES printed in capital letters so tiny that visitors needed a stepladder and a magnifying glass to find it. Cotton uses that image to describe self-love: the answer was always there – written in minuscule letters on a ceiling most of us never thought to look at.

We were taught to be kind to others and considerate of their feelings. Vital lessons – but the instruction to treat yourself with the same kindness never came. It wasn’t passed down through families or taught in schools. They weren’t taught it either. So here most of us are, well into adulthood, with no real idea how to like ourselves – or even what it means.