Best Friends, Bachelor Nation, and the Difference Between Love and Anxiety

Best Friends, Bachelor Nation, and the Difference Between Love and Anxiety

In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia's cup is full, and not by accident. Her best friend flew back to New York for the weekend to honour their annual tradition of seeing their favourite DJ, Blondish, play live. It was, as it often is with the people who truly know you, exactly what she needed. The show didn't go quite as planned, with a hysterical "VIP" experience, but the music was transcendent, and that kind of friendship, the kind built over years of shared history and deep knowing, doesn't need a perfect backdrop. Saskia reflects on what it means to have someone in your life who sees you in full, and how quietly extraordinary that is. That idea, of what real connection actually looks like, runs as a thread through the second half of the episode, where Saskia turns her attention to Bachelor Nation. She's been rewatching an old Bachelorette season and she has thoughts. Having grown up watching the show and taking it as the fairytale that falling in love is all about, she now watches it with the rose-coloured glasses fully off. What she sees troubles her: a franchise built on the firework relationship, on anxiety mistaken for chemistry, on self-worth handed over to whoever holds the rose. The contestants aren't falling in love. They're trauma bonding. And for years, we were watching it like it was a fairytale. Love is not a feeling that either hits or it doesn't. It's an action. A choice you make when it's hard and unglamorous and not under the stars during a candlelit dinner in Paris. That's the episode. Tune in.

Beef Season 2, Childhood Trauma, and the Pain You Don't Know You're Carrying

In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia is fresh off a solo weekend in Brooklyn. Jeffrey away, apartment to herself, an afternoon wandering Prospect Park and sitting under oak trees. It should have just been a nice walk. But it led somewhere she wasn't expecting: straight into a therapy session about a flood that happened when she was four, a 100-acre rainforest property in Australia that was destroyed overnight, and eight months of her own life she has no memory of at all. What she thought never really affected her turns out to be one of the most formative things that ever happened to her. That thread, pain buried so deep you don't even know it's there, is what ties this episode together. Because it shows up again in her pop culture pick: Beef Season 2, starring Oscar Isaac and Carrie Mulligan as a married couple whose opening fight is one of the most visceral, painfully real things she has seen on television. Saskia does a deep dive into what makes their relationship so triggering to watch, the line that unlocked the whole scene on set, what the show gets right about how we fight the people we love most, and why the final scene brought her to tears. She also gets into a part of the show that made her stop in her tracks... a Black Mirror-style hour set inside an American emergency room that quietly dismantles how women's pain is dismissed, undertreated, and disbelieved. And she closes with the thought she couldn't shake when it was all over. Pain that isn't acknowledged doesn't go away. It just finds another way out.

BONUS: Met Gala 2026 Best Dressed

In this special bonus episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia is dropping a timely mini episode on the Met Gala. The exhibition, Costume Art, asked guests to explore the indivisible connection between body and garment, treating fashion as an embodied art form. The dress code: Fashion Is Art. And Saskia had a lot of thoughts. One thread she couldn't stop pulling on: how many designers, independently, arrived at the same answer: the female body as icon. Venus de Milo appeared twice. The Winged Victory. The Black Madonna. On a night asking where the body ends and the garment begins, something kept pointing back to how women's bodies have been depicted, celebrated, and mythologised throughout history. She thinks that says something. This is her full Met Gala wrap sharing some of her favourite looks from Sabrina Carpenter, Kim Kardashian, Anok Yai, Hudson Williams, Emma Chamberlain, and more, sharpest critiques, and one moment that stopped her completely. Because what we wear is never just what we wear. It's what we're saying.

Big Mistakes, Sisters, and the Longest Relationship Most of Us Will Ever Have

In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia is fresh back from Canada after a few days with a close friend who now has a 3-year-old and a 9-month-old, followed by a perfect spring afternoon wandering around Toronto with her cousin. It was the kind of trip that fills you with other people's lives and quietly reminds you how much you value the time that's entirely your own. (Also: Toronto gave her a final send-off she absolutely did not ask for, involving a park, a man in the sun, and the realisation that no city is ever quite as charming as it seems.) The trip flows naturally into her pop culture pick of the week: Big Mistakes, the new Netflix show from Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott that she has not been able to stop watching. What she loves most isn't the premise, a stolen necklace that spirals into criminal chaos, but the sibling relationship at the heart of it. The bickering through impossible situations, the younger sister desperate to be seen, the older brother without the capacity to give it. It's one of the most honest portrayals of sibling dynamics she's seen on screen, and it opens the door to this episode's main conversation. Because the real topic is siblings, specifically, Saskia's relationship with her younger sister Lily. Seven years younger, the cooler version of her, and the person she can't stop laughing with. Saskia shares what she's learned: the raw, unfiltered version of yourself that only surfaces with a sibling, the fights with no rules of warfare, the childhood triggers both of them are still untangling in therapy, and what it actually means to choose someone who was never supposed to be optional. Your sibling might be the longest relationship you'll ever have. Whether you tend to it is up to you.

Victoria Flexner: Edible History, New York Nostalgia, and Why Trust Beats Hope

In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia welcomes her very first guest… and there could be no one better to open the door with. Victoria Flexner [http://victoriaflexner.com]is a food historian, the author of A History of the World in 10 Dinners [https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-history-of-the-world-in-10-dinners-2-000-years-100-recipes-jay-reifel/63711fbec5343e57?ean=9780847873456&next=t&], and the founder of Edible History, a newsletter and supper club that does exactly what it says: tells the story of the world through what we eat. She is also, as Saskia makes very clear, one of the most interesting people she knows. What unfolds is a wide-ranging conversation between two close friends who haven't run out of things to say. Victoria talks about how she built a career by following her curiosity rather than a plan… starting as a hostess at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan and ending up as a food historian publishing her first book, with the goal of teaching through food. The two dive into New York City: its energy, its constant reinvention, the grief of watching neighbourhoods change, and why Victoria, a born-and-raised New Yorker, has decided it might finally be time to leave. They also get into the dinner party as a lost art, the way food creates community in ways that nothing else quite can, and what it means to build a body of work out of pure obsession. The episode closes with Victoria's note to self… and it's one that stays with you. Trust, not hope. Because what is meant for you doesn't need to be held onto quite so tightly. Tune in now. Follow Victoria & find her work:🌐 victoriaflexner.com [http://victoriaflexner.com]📸 Instagram: @vflex [https://www.instagram.com/vflex/]📖 Buy A History of the World in 10 Dinners [https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-history-of-the-world-in-10-dinners-2-000-years-100-recipes-jay-reifel/63711fbec5343e57?ean=9780847873456&next=t&]