What is more important than money? Lessons from Stacey Duguid's Story

Two credit cards, maxed to roughly £35,000 between them. A tax bill she had not planned for. A mortgage whose interest payments nearly doubled overnight. Stacey Duguid, a fashion insider who spent years as Executive Fashion Editor at British Elle before freelancing across the industry for names like Net-a-Porter and Matches Fashion, ran out of money entirely in the space of about a year and had to sell her house. The following Christmas, she could not afford presents for her own children. When she finally wrote about it under her own name, she was not confessing to something new. She was catching up to a diagnosis she had already published two years earlier, in her own book, before the crisis had finished arriving.

She had already named it, before it happened to her

In 'In Pursuit of Happiness', published in 2024, Duguid described spending her twenties and thirties chasing a version of happiness she had picked up somewhere she could no longer trace to a single source, a dream marriage, a man who could save her, a life that looked, in her own words, absolutely fabulous right up until it wasn't. She traced it back further than any single bad decision, to what she called the stuff we pick up as little girls, an internalised set of roles she said takes a lifetime to actually unpack.