Sororal, the women’s travel platform behind the monthly newsletter Baggage Claim, has published a deeply personal essay by Egyptian-British author Salma El-Wardany, a piece, the team notes, that took a year to arrive. “One year ago, we reached out to Salma El-Wardany hoping she would write a piece for Baggage Claim, our monthly publication by women, about the stories we all carry,” the newsletter’s editors wrote. “That piece has finally arrived, and we couldn’t be more grateful to have her words guide us into this week. Let’s also raise a glass to the women who always show up for the trip.”

El-Wardany opens with an admission many will recognize: 2025 was, by every outward measure, fine — no tragedy, no loss — and yet it was a year in which she had quietly disappeared into everyone else’s needs, until she felt paralyzed and convinced her dreams were slipping away. Her response was to book a flight to Egypt, summon her two closest friends to a villa on the Red Sea, and spend New Year’s burning the old year down with them. What follows is a vivid account of the rhythm that took shape on that trip: workouts, sunsets, long dinners, the particular intimacy of women doing all of life’s invisible labour together and evenly, with no one left carrying more than their share.

The essay’s real subject is what happens to a woman when she is fully seen by other women; when there’s no hiding, no performing, just the unfailing enthusiasm of friends meeting every half-formed dream with “yes, of course you’d be amazing at that.” El-Wardany writes that she came home from that trip remade, not merely recharged, and credits the entire arc of a better 2026 to that week away. She closes the piece mid-flight, literally 37,000 feet over Sarajevo, en route to meet the same friends again, this time in Luxor, because one of them is going through something, and the only response among women like this is to book the trip without question.

Salma El-Wardany is the author of These Impossible Things, a longtime BBC Radio London presenter who recently stepped back from broadcasting to focus on her second novel and a TV adaptation of her debut, and the writer behind the Substack Sunday Cervix. The full piece can be read here.