My bones only have a brief few hours of respite after dinner, before we’re donning the suits and heading out into the snowy night for another walk up the hill, this time to the viewing camp, up quite a way past the lavvu, and around onto a wide, frozen lake backed by more snow-covered hills. Instead of repeating our intimate, silent trip from earlier, this one is with about twenty others, chatting hopefully, scattering glistening beams across the snow as we climb.

The clouds from today have cleared, I can see bright, sparkling stars above us. I shout the constellation names to my husband as I spot them, each one signalling that we are not in vain, we must keep believing.

After about twenty minutes, a haunting howl drifts around us: the sled-dogs have been set-off by something and are keening into the night. The sound is deeply eerie, and every bit the sound of wolves. We’re lagging behind; my exhausted legs fighting with this steep, snowy incline for the second time in just a few hours, whilst the red headlamps criss-cross way ahead over the distant slope. The chilling howls keep us company all the way to the camp.

A camera has been set up on a platform where a fire has been lit, surrounded by more reindeer-skinned benches. There’s another little tented area with another fire, tables, and hot chocolate and biscuits. We’re prepared to wait a while.

We get chatting as we sit by the fire, trying to stave off the cold that’s slowly seeping through our gloves, only to speak to another Scottish couple – one of whom is a seafarer who grew up in our hometown, my dad’s before mine. This is their third trip to catch the lights, they aren’t hopeful, and they leave tomorrow.

We go out and take photos of the stars, and I sing Wild Mountain Thyme to the night. It’s been three hours, and they say if they haven’t appeared by midnight, the usually don’t. Shortly after, when we’re heating our bones by the fire again, a cry outside calls us from our stupor, and we all rush out.

Something is wisping overhead, milky-white, fizzling. We hold our breaths, this must be the start of something.

Slowly, surely, the white intensifies to green, and the separate ‘folds’ come faster and closer together. Within minutes, the dancing ladies are stretched out across the lake, flowing from north-south. It feels like a kiss from beyond – I can understand how these shifting lights were (and in some cases still are) revered as the dead returning. They are friendly, aweing. We wait long past midnight, catching a second, better wind.

I am made.

This moment – if this is all I get of it, this will last me a lifetime.

We trudge slowly, filled with wonder, keeping some distance behind the other few people who stayed on, all of us trickling back to the resort. There is no moon, only stars light the way, and we switch off our headlamps, delighted to be able to see well enough in the starlit snow.

We sit in our cabin with tea, look at a couple of photos which turned out surprisingly okay, and chat all the way into bed, falling asleep mid-conversation.

The next day we rest and watch some tv, read, watch the snow fall. The blue hour wraps itself around the cabin and I can’t tear my eyes away from it. They are not long released from polar night here, and the sun’s low angle under the horizon casts a deep, glassy cobalt blue across the snowy mountains, the sea, the snow-lined trees.

We’re supposed to be enjoying a sauna and hot-tub in the evening, but they were damaged in the storm. So we enjoy a languorous meal instead, striking conversation with the couple next to us – we chat for a couple of hours, hearing about the culture and how Tromsø has changed due to tourism. Much like Edinburgh, it’s vital for the economy, but it homogenises what was once independent and diverse, and pushes living costs up considerably for locals.

No Aurora tonight, so we make the most of a night of relaxation, deciding to keep our booking for the following evening’s six-hour van chase from Tromsø.

In the morning, we are sad to leave but excited for the day’s adventuring in Tromsø. We pass deer eating seaweed down at the shore, the only foodstuff the snow and ice doesn’t cover. Our driver stops, pointing at a large, brown creature, wading through deep snow in a field in front of the fjord – a moose! He tells us it’s lucky to see them, and we snap a photo. Twenty minutes later, he stops again, and shows us where an even larger moose, much closer, is snaking through the snow towards a fence that borders woodland. I can’t believe the grace of the thing. He opens the bus door, cups his hands round his mouth, and produces a sound I cannot describe, to call the moose. It listens, curious. He tells us it’s rare to see not one but two moose in one day, and he’s never seen one this close. We embrace the moment, feeling so lucky to have experienced so much in such little time.

Tromsø is exactly as it is depicted – but even smaller than I imagined. Painted wood buildings, all different colours, shapes and heights, line the square, and our jaws drop when we walk over to the harbour, where enormous, looming mountains line the icy fjord, crossed by a bridge that is met by the towering Arctic Cathedral. The weather was forecast to be snowy, but instead a clear, bright sky stretches for miles in every direction, so we decide to cable-car up Fjellheisen mountain to the ski resort at the top.

The view over the white valley is breath-taking, candy-striped pastel light kissing every inch of the sky. We painstakingly trudge up the mountain, staring out over various snowy peaks. It’s like being in a dreamscape. We make snow-angels, take photos, and talk about our chances for tonight. The sun is already below the horizon on our way back down, where we disembark and walk through snow-covered suburbia, wondering at how easily life in the snow is managed here. It's marvellous, cold, dry stuff, not wet and sticky like the snow at home.

We thaw out over dinner at the hotel, watching the stars appear in the sky – at least it’s staying clear.

When the time comes, we cross the street in front of our hotel and meet our chase group – just us and four other couples, there are far bigger tour groups, so we’re happy to head off in our luxurious van which feels relatively intimate. Our guide tells us about the Aurora, and how it was historically perceived as dead spirits come back to walk the earth with us. Aurora means dawn, or the coming of the light.

Never have I ever felt so ready to meet a new dawn.

We’re heading for a lake outside of Dåfjord, an hour and a quarter from Tromsø – and at the tip of the islands, the next landmass north being Svalbard. Our guide tells us that we can light a fire and drink hot chocolate as we wait for the lights, saying we will see them – the KP has jumped to 4, which means there’s strong solar activity. We’re chatting to our fellow passengers when the van pulls into a layby, our guide is agitated with excitement – it’s here, it’s only 7pm and it’s here – we need to get out now so we don’t miss it.

Some reach for their snowsuits but we immediately jump out of the van, onto a wide, snowy layby overlooking a valley that stretches across the road. A bright, undulating, heavy green and pink curtain curls and ripples directly above our heads and we shout in surprise, hearing the same cries emitting from our fellow voyagers. Our guide is staring up in awe, a huge grin across his face. “This is amazing, guys – really good – we’ve not had Aurora like this for weeks!” My heart sings to see the same joy in my heart reflected on his face – and he does this every night. I wouldn’t get tired, either.

The way the green light shimmers, falls, stutters and curls is impossible to describe. We are speechless, awed, humbled by its beauty and it’s unfamiliarity. I cry openly, this moment has been a lifetime for me. For the first time in my life I am breathing, with both lungs, the oxygen only for me.

It’s astonishing how a stream of electrons and protons can feel like such a greeting.

As it intensifies we scream and shout like children, there is no other way to respond.

We don’t even waste a minute going back for our snowsuits. We happily, gleefully freeze our bones to bear witness to the best Aurora of the whole winter exploding above a snow-drenched valley, arctic wind stinging every inch of exposed skin, but we don’t care and we dance among the stars and the shimmering curtains anyway, whooping our joy as she turns into a spectacular display of bright, icy-pink ribbons that illuminate our awed faces and the landscape around us.

We’re from Brisbane, Texas, Amsterdam, London, Edinburgh, but we’re the same and under one sky. We make snow angels with our bodies, we lie across the snow and let it envelope us, the entire sky pressed against our skin, and when it lulls we huddle round the fire with hot cocoa, sitting on reindeer skins for warmth. I sing again this time for the group, feeling charged by the quick bond we’ve forged, and the lights charge over us once more. After four hours of freezing wind, I am numb and filled with wonder. We drive a short distance to capture the green-tinged dome above the frozen lake, and once again I give my paltry thanks to this otherworldly experience of lifetimes.

The guide comes to ask me if I wanted to see them particularly badly – there are others here who have tried before with no luck – and I tell him it’s been one of the greatest wishes of my heart, and something I extended my gratitude for the moment we knew we were coming. He looks at me intently, his eyes the same piercing blue as the herder’s, and asks, “did you do magic to bring them here?”. His intuition is uncanny, his expression easy and wide-open. I tell him I lean heavily on instinct, intuition, gratitude, and on words. Sung, uttered, written. I wrote about the trip before we came, calling it into being. He fingers the pendant hanging form the leather cord around his neck. “This is my magic, it’s yew. It protects from dark and welcomes the light.” I smile at him, say it must have worked. He says, “yeah, but tonight is one of the best I’ve seen in twelve years – top five. I think maybe there’s extra magic here, I am glad you do your magic before you come.” He nods vigorously.

I wander off a way with my husband, and we lie in the snow under the stars.

I sing again, quiet, a voice of deepest, most humbled gratitude.

In this deepest, darkest, Arctic night, a heart is remade.

Sending you love and light over this deepest part of winter. I hope this brings comfort as you tilt once more towards the light x

As we come to our longest, darkest day in the Northern hemisphere, I am once again ruminating on the seismic shifts that have taken place since the last. Life has swung wildly away from all I thought I knew, and it’s all I could do to just to try and keep steady in the chaos whilst I’ve been working things out.

I believe that life is an evolution of cycles, big and small, daily and yearly, and even beyond that. It feels like I’ve been at the concentric point of many cycles all breaking and birthing at once, rippling and undulating into and out of life: some too fast to catch, others slowly, expansively, until I’m not sure where they begin and I end in the midst of it all.

Revelation.

This seems to be the theme for my winter solstices, and this year is no different. Since I’ve been writing on here, I’ve marked midwinter, and the revelations that have been brought by the revolutions in my life. I was on the cusp of the biggest yet, last year, but too tired and fragile after losing my dad to name it. I’ve been diligently working through it with the support of my therapist, so that here, a year later, I have accepted a new truth, and in doing so, found that elusive feeling of space I’ve forever been searching for.

It’s the strangest thing, amidst much upheaval: moving house (and all the challenges that brings), adjusting to life without my dad as some kind of ‘normal’, going on submission as an author for the first time, dreadful bouts of sickness, work stress… to find myself feeling an internal steadiness that’s never been there before. This latest revelation has, unbelievably, given me the ability to finally be still amidst chaos. A phenomenal gift, and one I was desperately in need of, for most of my life.

I realised there’s no better way to wave farewell to the dark, than to share this deeply personal story of catching the Aurora Borealis on a trip to Arctic Norway earlier this year, just as I was coming through this deepest revelation; so heavy, I was literally throwing myself into the light.

It’s taken me ten months to feel able to write about this jaw-dropping, bone-aching, heart-healing adventure in the Arctic, because I’ve needed to sit with the magic of it, and to let it just be mine for a while, before I share it. I’ve been feeling out that internal expansion, testing it’s strength, seeing if it holds. New things are fragile.

But it has held, and so, in the hope it might inspire you to chase your own light this winter, I’ve decided to share this incredible experience, to celebrate this solstice.

At the beginning of February this year, just a few weeks after my revelation precipitated, and in the raw midst of my Becoming, my husband and I decided to live our short lives with a wild fury, and booked a last-minute trip to Tromsø, hoping to fulfil my childhood dream of seeing the Northern Lights. I spent the week prior deep in rabbit-holes, researching where in the Arctic Circle to go, and how to have the best chances of seeing them. I quickly ruled out Finland, Iceland, and Sweden – all had their own magic to offer, but Norway made my gut ring a deep chime – and I always listen. Call it intuition, call it magic, or maybe it was the stories my dad told me about spending summer nights with his Norwegian friends, singing and playing guitars above the fjords, where his ship had docked below, some fifty years before. I just knew it was where we had to be. We booked four nights: Tromsø as our first and last, and a resort about an hour’s drive, for the middle two. Activities at the resort, including an Aurora-viewing night, and a van chase on our last night in Tromsø, just in case.

We burnt a hefty hole in our pockets stocking up on snow-boots, thermals, wool jumpers, hats, and gloves, and as our departure ticked closer, so my anticipation grew. We avidly watched the weather reports, a massive storm was due to hit just a couple of days before our arrival. We talked several times a day about whether we should bail, try again a bit later, though we’d lose money if we did.

Something deep inside was saying, Wait. Be patient.

Flying to the Arctic Circle is a joy that I cannot describe, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the pure-white land-masses rippling turquoise-blue and neon coral-pink in the light of the low sun beneath us. Every bit the picture from my childhood books, my dad’s deep, melodic voice ringing over my shoulder.

We arrived at Oslo airport for a quick changeover, chittering to each other like kids – we’re in Norway! After a short wait for our next departure, we were already standing waiting to board with the other passengers before it was announced that the layover pickup in Tromsø, on route to Alta, was no longer possible due to the storm. The chiming in my gut hardened, frozen with panic. Was my internal compass damaged?

After a couple of extremely fraught hours, which saw others turning back for home, we finally secured an early morning flight. We shared a pizza and crawled into bed, totally exhausted in the airport hotel, deeply sorry to not be in Tromsø to start our adventure, but entirely relieved to still be getting our chance.

We arrived at Tromsø airport the following morning to find twelve feet of freshly dumped snow on the roof, and still falling. The entire landscape was white. We quickly changed into our layers and snow boots to await our pick-up to the resort I’d chosen for the next two nights.

After an hour’s drive through banks of compacted ice, snow-topped pine trees and picture-book cabins against steel-grey fjords, we arrived in the utter stillness and silence of the fjord-side resort, to a picture of quintessential Nordic beauty. Our apartment, one of several adjoining red cabins, complete with pointed roof and balcony over the fjord, was cosy and immediately felt like home. We hurried over and opened the balcony doors to take giant steps into two-feet deep, fresh, powdery snow; our laughter peeling across the steely water, giant, fat white snowflakes clinging to our Fairisles.

My dad’s favourite songs greeted us when we arrived at the resort restaurant for lunch, ringing out over the duration of our meal, feeling like a big fat hello, I remember this place, you’ve made it.

Afterwards, we went up to the activity station, donning thick blue thermal suits for our first excursion. The most seasoned snowmobiler or dog-sledder couldn’t match my excitement as I readied for a trek up the hill through the forest to meet the resort’s resident Arctic Reindeer herd, loaned to them by the local Sámi herder. Such wonderful creatures, things of magic and mysticism in our world.

The walk up was something from a dream, only pine forest and snow, in any direction you looked. I hung back, walking slowly, feeling out the footsteps that have trekked this ground for thousands of years before my own. It’s not hard in this untouched and bracing beauty, to imagine what it felt like to be here back then, how life must have been absolute survival against the aching cold, no snowsuit to see you through.

The reindeer waited keenly, eyeing us, as we approached with our guide and the other couple who came with us. The reindeer meld with the snow, of course. They came over, ready for their feed, and I was astonished to find a young reindeer nuzzling eagerly at my arm. I reached out my hand and stroked his feather-soft, pure-white head before I’ve even thought about whether this it was okay. Our guide said it’s no problem, so off I go, crouching and chatting to them, tickling their heads and chins, telling them how happy I am to be here.

An hour later, we were huddled in our cosy Lavvu, big, soft flakes of snow curling blue through the hole at the top, only to fizzle and pop out of existence above the licking flames. Our guide made us coffee – the Sámi way – which he brewed in a pot, stuffing the spout with fresh pine needles, both to filter the grit and flavour the liquid. It’s divine. He showed us traditional clothing and cooking items, and we sipped our hot drinks from kuksa cups, the reindeer furs on the benches keeping our legs and bums warm. Only a small patch at the bottom of my back, against the skin of the Lavvu, felt slightly cold. I try to imagine sleeping in here sans snowsuit, and it makes me shiver.

Our guide demonstrated how to light a fire with feathered curls of birch bark, and a kupilska firesteel, lighting an impressive blaze each time. A hooded figure poked his head through our tent opening, the tip of a rifle above his reindeer-skinned shoulder, and our guide looked a little alarmed. The man, very old, but wiry and lithe, stepped in, calling to him and gesturing. Our Italian-English-Norwegian speaking guide manages to determine that he’s speaking Sámi – he is the herd-owner’s uncle, here to see a sick reindeer. Our guide leaves with him, and after a few minutes, I follow them into the blue light.

I watch as he deftly checks the animal, before they come back through the gate. On my approach, I ask the guide to help me to translate. We can only really use our gestures, but I find the piercing blue eyes under the thick, well-worn hood, and I feel the connection. I gesture to the reindeer, to feeding and stroking them, to the area around us, and I hold my hands over my heart, letting my expression show him what it means to me to be here. He searches my eyes, then a grin spreads wide as it translates. I point at myself, say my name, then point at him, tilt my head. He points at himself, grinning, “Isak-tur”. I repeat it, and my gesture of hand-on-heart. He looks at me, reading me, grins again. Then he tugs at the ancient loop of rope crossing his body, “lasso?” he points at me.

I am flushed with exhaustion and excitement from looping and throwing the lasso, just as he’s shown me, at a not-so-near fence post; when my husband and the other couple come out into the blue to see where we’ve gone. A layer of thick snow had bedded into the guide’s hair in the time it took us to get our lessons, which he generously and joyfully delivered. The dark had closed in when we said goodbye, and we waved him off by the red glow of our headlamps, into the shadowed trees to trek the many miles back to his herd and home; an arduous task even with his snowshoes. Our guide was beside himself with the encounter, the rarest chance, he says, to meet this ancient herder, still using the old ways, which he can barely believe.

On the way back to the resort, we passed the sled-dogs, calm, freshly back from a run. They really do look like wolves, with their piercing blue eyes and pointed ears. They listen intently when you talk to them.

Back at the resort, we burned marks onto antler fragments for our duodji, a traditional Sámi craft, to complete the day’s education. I opted for symbols of the moon and the divine feminine, imbuing what energy I had buzzing through me into the bone, as I sent out my gratitude for the day that’s been, and for the night that’s still to come.

Keep your eyes peeled for part two tomorrow! xx

[I’m taking a vulnerable step and uploading the audio I recorded for this, which is often how I write, but usually I only put up the transcript. I feel like it’s more connecting, somehow. I hope it speaks to you]

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It's eight months since we gave your bones back to the sea, one year and eight months since you left a distance I cannot comprehend, let alone hold.

The ground today is covered with a thick layer of frost-crystals sparkling in the low winter sun, cascading rainbows tumbling over leaves and rocks. The sand of the shore is stiff beneath my feet, resisting any pressure, suspended in animation. I wish that I could be frozen in time. I wish that time would stop and stand still in this frost. For me, such big things have opened up since you left – such huge questions that still need grappling with, and I'm so spent and tired from working things out. Can my body be suspended if I just keep it below zero? Can I pause the inevitable and the difficult and the unknown? Can I just hang here at the end of the pier, looking out at the boats and this still icy blue water, just you and me for a while? Because that's it, isn't it, Dad? I come down here when I just need to be still, because that's where you met me. For most of my life and our relationship, you gave me space and peace and a curious mind to sit and figure things out.

There were ice crystals floating on the water this morning, and they curved, curling trails across the surface of the sea and split it into light and shadow in a way that I've never seen before. And it was mesmerizing. For a minute, I sort of panicked, and I thought, Oh, my God, the sea is frozen. I've never seen that. So not possible, but the light really played a trick on my mind. My first thought was, but, but you're in there like you won't be able to swim around and have fun and do your thing and go off around the world and come back again, or whatever it is that my weird brain thinks that the molecules of your carbon do. It makes me laugh, because it's so silly and childish, but there we are. I was a child. I was your child, and I will always be your child, therefore I am a child.

Yeah, I am a 38-year-old child, who's still a little bit lost at sea, but I'm definitely making inroads to coming back to shore, and I think I've probably got a really sturdy paddle, maybe more than a paddle. Maybe I've got an engine now, and I'm definitely cutting a clearer line across the water now. But I'm havering, I’m havering. There's life decisions there. There's two forks in the road. You know, it's funny to find yourself in a space where this mother shaped thing in you suddenly opens up at the point in life, finally, where physicality and reality make that an issue and a problem and one that's not easy to unpick.

Yeah, I think you liked having kids, but it's funny, it took me to today to come down to the water and think about my own sense of adventure and feeling of being some kind of voyager, whether that's metaphorically through words and stories or like literally, like around the world, like you. You were a voyager in those ways, too. And I was talking to my therapist about how much my creativity all these years has really been sort of materialized escape. It's been me pushing against so many hard things, and now that it turns out the hardest of those has kind of been snapped away, and suddenly I'm lurching forward with the same force, but I'm going at thrice the speed because there's the glue on the bottom of my boots has come unstuck that I've always been tugging against – and here I am just pelting forth with creativity, not as an escape and not as a resistance, but just as an expression. And that's kind of new territory, and I don't really know what to do with it. And it's, yeah, it's strange. It's an interesting one.

And I'm here and I'm thinking, Well, what things were pushing you onto boats to go out and see the world? Was it curiosity? Was it bright-eyed, you know, taste for adventure, or was it escape? You were 17 when you decided that you were going to be a seafarer and not a something else. And, yes, this was the 70s. This was the time of of freedom and exploration and liberation and a lot of kind of just listening to your heart, man, (and prog rock), and yeah, I wonder you were so young that maybe you weren't escaping so much, but I don't know that. You know, I think I can figure out that you had a pretty steady, healthy, loving home life. So I reckon it's probably being inspired and just wanting to go and have some fun, but I think maybe there was an element of freedom there as well. Given that your parents were in their forties when they adopted you, I think your dad was even possibly in his fifties. They were later parents than most. So yeah, maybe there was an element of generational differences that were a bit constraining.

And I can see you sort of wanting to, because you were always so behind us, getting out and doing our own thing and building our own lives and getting on with life and getting jobs and just going out and living our own lives. So I wonder if, yeah, that's partly where that came from. It's a strange thing. I'm always asking questions about you, and now you're not here to answer them, so I just have to make my best guess. But it's the most beautiful day today, a year and eight months since you left, and it's criminal, because whenever I come down here, you're the one person I want to stand on the fucking pier with. And of course, you're all over it and around it metaphysically, but you are not here in the way that you once were and in the way that I needed you. So yeah, thanks for that. Yeah. Happy. Almost December. It's gonna be our second Christmas without you.

I don't really know what to do with that. The first was so bewildering and discombobulated, it was still a shock, and now it's just going to be the new normal, and new normals are sometimes really hard, so I'm really going to fucking miss you. I'm going to miss you giving us a new playlist, and I'm going to miss you making chomping sounds on your Terry's chocolate orange and you laughing at whatever cheesy shit is on the TV for Christmas. Your chortled. Did you know that? Did you know you chortled? Not everyone chortles. I think I can chortle. My husband would say I chortle at my own jokes, which is probably true. I think I get that from you… ‘the family trough’... We were good at laughing, all of us, actually, we were always good at laughing, and we still are good at laughing, which is nice, but it's just less funny without you, because you had the best laugh. [laughs] That's a really bad impression. I'm sorry.

But you used to do the thing where you're like, you'd move your head back so your chin would kind of tuck, and you'd kind of laugh from under your giant mustache. And there were other times where it's like an incredulous laugh, and you'd be more like, [laughs], you know, I miss it. I miss it so much. I wish it. I wish I had a recording of your laugh. I don't know if I do. I have recordings of you speaking and telling me your stories at sea, and I listened to them, and it's really nice, and it's like you're back in the room, but you me, we used to have a right good giggle. Sometimes we would get ourselves in such knots that we couldn't breathe, and we'd kind of be looking at each other like, this is class, isn't it? And I just miss that so much. I miss it dad, and miss that camaraderie, you know, just laughing for the sake of laughing. [cries] I still cry too much. Maybe not enough. I don't know.

I just really miss you, and I still wish I could yank your bones back out of the water and rebuild you, but I can't, and I'm really glad that you're free, and you're out there and you're free of all the crap that was going on. But, you know, selfish, I suppose it just sometimes I just want my dad and I need to be parented. And you may not have been absolutely perfect, but you were kind of, you know, not bad. And we're always children. I think that's what I'm learning in your absence, is I will always be this child, needing my dad.

You old bugger. Now come back and make some more fart jokes, please. Even if that's all it is… that'll be enough.

I miss going to you and asking your advice on things. And I miss showing you and reminding you that you were not your disability. You know you were just you and you were still you, and no matter what anyone else made you feel, I knew that. You know, you never stop being awesome.

Too many tears, always crying. The sea is fucking half me now… I made half an ocean with my sadness. Are you impressed? I probably could make three worlds over and then some, if I allowed myself. Planetfuls of grief. Anyway.

I'm not always a good writer, Dad, especially when I'm sad. It is what it is, isn't it?

So today, today is the blue marble kind of day. The sea is mirror, a mirror to the sky, and it's perfect. And it's just 360-degrees of ice-white and pale blue and cerulean, and then a little bit of yeah, that lovely lemony yellow just along the horizon. And you sent me a song – thanks for that – in your way, the other day, and it's been stuck in my head since, maybe because we've had such good weather.

[Sings]

Away beyond the blue

one star belongs to you

one star belongs to you

and every breath I take

I'm closer loser to that place

Well, baby, I'm gonna meet you there

on the outskirts of the sky

oh, baby, I'm gonna meet you there

and we will fly

away beyond the blue.

Beth Nielsen, Chapman: one of your absolute favorites. I think you put it on more than one compilation, actually, for for us. I wish I could remember the year, definitely 1990 something. But I miss you.

And I guess I’m just saying I’m always looking for you out there.

Away, away, beyond the blue.

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We had a wonderful time, I’m so grateful to have been asked to be a trustee: it’s been a learning curve, and I’m privileged to help to guide and support a publication which seeks to uplift women who write – which is so important particularly to disabled women who face multiple barriers in developing their writing. I know all too well how long it takes to ‘make it’ as a writer.

Fifteen years ago, when I was freshly graduated from an honours in biomedicine, I knew it wasn’t to be. Science had to be creative for me. Connected to art, to nature… to wonder. I decided about two days after I left university that I wanted to try and write and illustrate children’s books instead. Pretty big swing, right? I’d always loved them, I still haven’t grown out of reading them, and I think they are the most wonderful pieces of literature in the world. And arguably, the most impactful (what a gift, to shape early mindsets and core beliefs about the self and the world).

I did not know what I was doing, though. I set to slinging the biggest haul of picture books I could manage from my local library every day back to my flat, where I’d pour over their tattered, sticky wee pages, sussing out page layout, story arc, page-counts, style and flow. Rhythm. At some point I committed to giving myself three years to ‘make it’.

My (now) husband and I moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh at this time, and a world of books blossomed at my doorstep. I met real authors and illustrators and I learned from them. I saw that it was possible.

For Christmas that year, my husband gifted me the 2009 Children’s Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook, with a bolstering new author’s letter from Debi Gliori. ‘Take heart’, she told me, ‘it can be done’. I cried when I opened the parcel, and my husband told me firmly how much he believed in me, how he just knew I would make it.

He also took me down to Newcastle to visit a very magical museum of children’s books, which I had no idea existed, where we spent hours marvelling at the amazing work of my heroes. Planting seeds.

We’ve returned several times since, to see new exhibitions, to keep the dream alive, though I’ve taken a meandering path through poetry, memoir and fiction for young adults (so far): after a long road of interning, bookselling, freelancing and consulting.

Last week was the first time that I was there by invitation, because of the work I do. I stood in front of the magical drawings of Judith Kerr, hero of my own childhood, and I thanked her for showing me the way. If I hadn’t been madly in love with children’s books like the ones she created, I would never have embarked on this winding path to where I am now.

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A portfolio writer; with an access guide published by Penguin Random House, and supported by many more publishers and literature organisations, and just this year, an agent who is my absolute dream cheerleader, and who holds the same values close to her heart as I do.

Finally on the cusp of something ‘more’ with my creative writing. A whole other adventure to look forward to in the years to come.

Fifteen years and only just getting started could feel like a failure – but it’s been worth every bend in the river, every ableist attitude, every barrier, to be here on the cusp.

I tell the luminous paintings on these walls that I’m proud I stuck it out this long, kept believing, against the odds. Despite shitty experiences – the situations where I almost gave up – somewhere deep down inside of me, a little star-seed kept burning.

And now I’m privileged to be giving it back – always the dream. If I can make it easier for those like me, who travel behind me, I absolutely will.

I sit in the magical, stately author chair, and chat with the lovely in-house storyteller about the kind of events I dream of doing with neurodivergent young adults who are carers, or who have mental health issues, or who just are trying to find their identity and place in the world. I feel like I’m speaking spells under the stars and twinkle lights, on the eve of Halloween, little bats and ghosts dancing trails above my head.

Fifteen years later, I am here. I hope I’m making a difference.

I hope I can one day shine as bright for someone else as Judith did for me.

Are you always chasing the finish line? How do you celebrate the little victories? I’d love to hear from you in the comments xx

I think of you all of the time

Now that you’re gone

I want so badly to talk to you, Dad.

To wish you a happy sixty-ninth birthday, give you a giant bear-hug and some obscure music or space-related gift, instead of clinking our solemn beers over our plates amidst the chatter of the Real Greek restaurant where no one knows you should be here.

I want to tell you I’m building a playlist, brand-new, stuff I haven’t heard before, just for you, like you did so many times for us.

I’m sorry it took me so long.

I want to hear the melody of you again.

It’s a paltry offering, this piecemeal playlist, but it’s the closest magic I can forge to what it felt like to sit and just talk with you. To hear the way you say ‘Mh-hm’, drawing out the deep vowel-sound, whilst you run a thoughtful thumb over your moustache. The way you’d lean back, eyes wide when something I said surprised you. Or you’d lean forward, rub your hands, elbows perched on your knees if you were listening close and concerned.

Songs were your conversations, weren’t they? I can’t believe how much more that makes sense to me now you’re gone. I wonder if everyone has the revelations I have after they lose someone they love. How can you make more sense to me now than you did before? Does death invite us somehow to be a detective around all those never-had conversations?

I suppose it makes sense. It was the biggest fucking shock in the world when you ceased existing. I thought I’d been preparing mentally, but that was bullshit. I’d been kidding myself on. Tugging a cocoon over my worry and doubt, my fear that you’d leave me stranded here on Earth, too soon. (*Latest on the infinite-multiverse, by the way – it’s increasingly likely, and we ARE the only sentient specks of dust in it all. But maybe you’re partying with aliens and proving us all wrong (you’d love that).

You left, in the way you did; still beating and staring and warm, and I guess maybe there was some messed-up grace in us being the ones to pull that final plug in a too-bright room which didn’t smell of you, or have your nick-nacks, or your Harris machair photo or the painting I did of the electric guitar with the neon-pink lead under the night sky.

I held on to your hand – did you feel that?  I didn’t let go. Ran my thumb over your wedding ring, your soft skin, again and again as we said goodbye. As they removed your breathing tube and your beautiful rhythm slowed and slowed. Did you hear me saying thank you, Dad? For everything?

I meant it.

On your birthday, I went down to the water.

Pressed play on your voice for the first time since you left, and it didn’t break me. It wrapped me in warmth and made me smile. Felt like you were right here next to me; telling me about your Cadet days, and how you shimmied up narrow rope ladders that ascended the hull of giant oil tankers, not a care in the world about the ninety-foot plummet to certain death below. How is this my Dad? How is this you? I shake my head at the sheer madness of it.

I also came here to tell you that we got a house.

Finally.

It’s only taken us three years, I know. I can see the wide smile crossing your cheeks and hear your Oh! Tremendous! And feel your hugs and congratulations.

I’ve barely been able to speak it aloud, it’s felt so unreal. You were the first person we wanted to tell. I bet you wouldn’t be surprised to hear it’s very similar to the one I grew up in, the one we loved for eighteen years, the one we lost when you had your breakdown. It surprised me.

I’ve had to pick up a lot of broken glass (and sustained a few injuries in the clean-up) in the fifteen years since we lost our home. It’s really only been this year that I’ve fully made peace with it, understood they why of it… the things you’ve carried for so long. I know I directed a lot of my anger and confusion at you, and I’m sorry. I couldn’t understand how you’d lost your way so much, it took me too long to understand how out at sea you truly were. I’m so glad we got those last two years though, when you moved here.

Wherever we go      

Wherever we bide                                    

Whatever the wind and weather                         

Wherever we go     

Wherever we bide                              

We’ll travel these waves together

When the storm has blown away 

 And the night is as still as your sleeping  

 I’ll pluck out the skelf of the moon from the sky 

 And I’ll give it to you for safekeeping

I saw Karine play this song live, by the way, five months after you left, and this did break me. Utterly. ( *I thought she sang ‘We’ll travel these waves together’, until now). It was in a public setting with my peers, where there was no escape. So I hung my head and gave in to the sting of you missing this, tears and snot decorating my shoes, entirely undone when I had been telling myself I was okay. *I’ll never be okay with you being gone.

When we walked through the front door of this house, we felt immediately at home. The lovely owner showed us around, room after room unpeeling before us, and it felt like some parallel universe was dropping missing pieces on our path. She reminded me of you. Calm, observant, charming – steadying.

It’s got a garden, too. A secret word I’ve been testing the shape of as I whisper it into the wind on my walks.

It wraps around the house on three sides, and has the room we’ve been craving to set roots and grow. You’d be cracking jokes about all the lawn-mowing, but I have grand plans for veg growing, wildflower beds and places to relax and unwind.

Blueberry.

Bramble.

Raspberry.

Marigold.

Cornflower.

Dog-rose.

Every utterance is a spell cast, surely.

It’s closer to the water, the harbour and the bridges. Close to the spot you loved, where the boats sway and slosh, clink-clinking in a steady rhythm. The place that pulled you back to memories of happier days at sea.

Before, before.

Where will you go my darling daughter?
   I'm gonna live down by the water

Water heal my body
Water heal my soul
When I go down, down
To the water
By the water I feel whole

We hope this home will grow with us, in whatever way suits. A gathering place, for friends, for sure. A place to discover the next chapters of ourselves as a team and as individuals. The instruments are going to be in the heart of our home, in an open space that flows and connects through the house, and we’re going to be playing all the time, and we hope our friends will join us, too. There’s nothing quite like sharing music with friends, is there Dad? (Did you know we go along to your Jolly Boys drinks, now? Such a joy to hear stories about you from your boyhood friends, and to talk about life and music in your honour.)

Music is going to flow out of our windows and doors, just like it did in our home, because you made sure of it.

I think I’m trying to say thanks, Dad.

For the music.

But for it all, really.

Eastern sun

Melt the cold from my bones
Curtain rise

Take the darkness from my eyes
Breathing in

Pulling life into my lungs
As a child

I am born again

Five days ago, when the full moon was 99.8% illuminated (or effaced as I like to call it), I sat down to my laptop to join an online gathering of women – my first, in fact. And it wasn’t planned – I just happened to see the post about it a day or so prior, and I knew in my bones that I must go.  I’d always thought if I ever did attend a gathering like this, it would be in person, and probably as part of a weekend retreat somewhere far away. A place that facilitated an escape from daily life, offered the chance of hitting the re-set button, and to get to know the other women in the circle.

It turns out none of that is required in order to fully step in, to meet yourself exactly where you are, and to know the fellow souls that have gathered in their own homes, all over the world, to witness.

It was last July, at the height of my most fractured, post-grief state; when I discovered the wondrous facilitator of this circle, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, through a deeply moving interview she gave on Katherine May’s podcast, How We Live Now. Here was someone talking so eloquently about how we heal from our traumas, as a collective. How rooting, and understanding our ourselves deeply, is so vital to how we connect. I knew I needed to read her work, and so I went and bought Cacophony of Bone at the first opportunity, consuming it piece by piece, letting her words wash over me and through me.

How strange, to encounter this work, as I neared the end of recording the day-to-day of my own nature/grief memoir, which I started the September prior: encompassing burnout, my search for myself, and the unexpected and seismic loss of my beloved dad… the tectonic shifts that have shaken me since. The deep interrogation of Mother; all that it means, carries, holds, and is not. The expectations and the disappointments. The unravelling of all I once thought I knew.

I’d read Kerri’s gentle, careful words (somehow I felt utterly held, like a baby bird exhausted from breaking out of its shell) and wonder, how they could chime so perfectly with my own experiences and questions. Did she know, four years ago as she wrote this, that they were everything I needed, four years into the future?

People close to me made babies and thought it would be a wondrous thing if I (despite a plethora of odds stacked against me) made them too.

People close to me made babies and (thinking it would be a wondrous thing if I did too) told me so.

Babies were everywhere, all the time – as always they are – but we still never spoke of them, not even once. Not when each year crept round the corner, reminding us that time is an oddly boned creature; one that waits – as well you know – for no woman.

Never once did we sit together and talk about the delicate nuances that marked our lives. Things that made it seem certain that babies were definitely not a thing on our horizon. Things such as illness, age, circumstance, money, the past, the future, the present.

Next month, on the cusp of the summer solstice, coinciding with the full Birth Moon, I will turn thirty-eight. I always thought I’d be a parent. But my partner and I (of twenty-two years) have never yet tried. Along with the uncanny points made in the above passage, there are other things that weigh heavily – not least the shifting plates, and some huge unknown (but knowable) factors with my future health that are too terrifying to peer into, for now.

For years, I have been untangling threads across lifetimes, generations, that meet here, in my personhood. I have been finding myself. Individuating. Rooting. Giving birth… to myself.

Our gathering at Kerri’s invitation – Moss, Mother, Moon – felt like an initiation ceremony into the next phase of my being. Her words and her state-of-being are a balm, in such times. Gathering against the vast cruelty and trauma in the world, in ourselves. We showed up, right from the moment our screens connected. I didn’t know what to expect, but Kerri started off by asking us to consider how we view ourselves as women, and sharing her thoughts on the importance of the Moon, and our connection to it. She shared some of the ancient, beautiful names the May full moon has come to be known by:

Flower Moon

Milk Moon

Leaf Budding Moon

Planting Moon

She then went on to say how to her, Moss was such a deeply powerful creature, which resonated so strongly with me, as I’m forever to be found with my nose in the microcosm of nature (or my fingers running through just-after-rain moss, when the petrichor’s at its sweetest) and I think of the natural world as fully, totally alive and sentient.

Then we came to Mother, which she said we could ‘talk about for decades’ which is so true. It felt really inclusive to be told that we don’t have to have given birth, or raised children, to be mothers. We can be mothers in a myriad of ways to the world and to ourselves.

As someone who has been a carer for my own mother for most of my life, who nurtures by default, this was extremely powerful.

Kerri repeated the world held, often, which is something I’m always seeking to feel, and to have others feel in my presence. It’s how I felt in this circle, as we shared our interpretations of what circle means. Infinite, connected, nurturing, belonging, cloud-gaps, witnessing – far more words than I can recall, but all equally powerful and shared.

As if in cupped hands, Kerri gathered us, and invited us to close our eyes, in order to visualise. So soothing were her words, I found myself asking, can the voice of Mother Nature herself be embodied here on earth?

I was instantly in the landscape she described: able to see the quality of the light, feel the balmy air, smell the twilight-freed nectar, hear the crackle of rushes as a swooping, silent heron scraped them with a wing-tip. The long, hooting cry of a white owl, and the burning orange gaze of a fox, slinking along the treeline. I heard my name and turned to find my sister-self, floating upright, totally still, in water (as I do) waiting. Feet-long auburn tendrils coil from her head over the water’s surface, over the land and up into the distant mountains. She is so calm, so solid and at peace.

The sunset sky burns vibrant orange and the sinking sun tints everything pink. Kerri makes an offering: a single word, pulled form a deck. Presence.

Three words rise in my mind.

Expand.

Expulse.

Root.

As we are called to waken, the scene burns bright, effervescent orange, white-hot.

Escape fire, to become fire.

We are invited (not expected) to share our words, and what they mean to us.

The women in this circle blow me away with their insight, vulnerability, and their willingness, to share their wisdom, and to witness. All wonderful, and one person’s response stood out to me in particular, who shared that her take on presence was connected to some writing by Virginia Woolf on planting bulbs around her garden:  ‘To trust that what has come before was meant to happen, and it will yield what it’s supposed to. I don’t have to be too far ahead of myself, I can trust, and that allows me to be present’.

When it comes my turn there is one new, luminous word, floating in front of all else.

Ignite.

Kerri reads a beautiful poem, The Night Garden, by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, who’s words move me beyond myself.

Their humming sculpts the air like a night loom…

we do not know if this is our end

or our birth

they braid the future like a child’s hair

singing, and

sewing bright dark seeds into it.

If anything can capture the hope of women meeting in circle in a destroyed world, this is it. Our simply showing up here, is another stitch in the dewy fabric of this universe: the ‘bright dark seeds’ exquisitely conveying our limitless capacity: to love, lose, comprehend, and keep going.

I take the ringing in my bones as a sign that my New Year oracle reading, which I wrote about, is starting to manifest. Go to the water, let go, and bring your kin-folk with you.

We close with Kerri pulling six-cards from two decks, representing the past, or most recent season (an example Kerri gave of this was maidenhood), present (i.e this full moon, or a question we’ve had pressing on our minds) and future (summer into autumn or the next stage for you). The cards resonate deeply, asking a lot about patience and fear (past), balance and where our energy flows (present), and a white owl appears (future) – speaking of unprecedented growth and the end of a long journey.

I know what this means for me – and that the end of this particular journey, is also a new beginning, a re-imagining of myself and what I can be.

I’ve been searching for the threads that scattered when I lost my family home, sixteen years ago. They’ve woven through a novel, a nature memoir, countless poems – it’s been an undoing, of the highest order. A painful interrogation of home, of where we find it, how we rebuild it when it’s been lost.

I cradle it all, the broken egg-shells of it, as I bear the deepest grief I’ve known.

Learning the hardest, most formative lesson:

 ‘I am home’.

It’s impossible to describe such an event as this; when I messaged a friend the next morning, waking very early and off-kilter, all I could say was: ‘women are power’.

The best possible way to communicate that sense of both collective magic, and personal, as I lean in to being present, to giving myself permission – to ignite.

My greatest thanks and gratitude to Kerri for providing this safe space to gather, to witness, and to grow; and for her generosity in letting me share this post with you. It was a privilege to sit with these women on my first circle, and it won’t be my last.

Have you joined a circle before? What did you think? Please let me know in the comments xx

Do you ever feel like you’re constantly inhabiting the in-between moments in life? Waiting for the next thing to arrive? Trying desperately to be present, grounded, fully there for the joys brought in the everyday – whether it’s a steaming cup of salted dark chocolate on a driech day, or the first kiss of sun on your bare skin after months of being swaddled in wool, or the rolling, high-pitched laughter that peels so easily from you when something’s unexpectedly funny. But still, your mind is attached to the latest manuscript, or next talk, or next… monument, whatever that may be for you.

I’ve been reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (late to the game as usual) and it deeply resonates with the mindset I’ve been cultivating these last few years, since burning out at age thirty. I didn’t know I was neurodivergent or chronically ill back then; but I knew something had to change, because I was simply not able to meet the expectations of a neurotypical world that isn’t built for me. I’ve been working to the beat of my own drum for eight years now (thanks to the financial support of my neurotypical husband, who does function in a neurotypical world), but I’m still guilty of seeing my working successes as a sign of my personal worth and value.

This book interrogate our belief that we tiny humans are inherently important to the functioning of the world – if we put down our work, it will stop spinning. It’s a mindset that keeps us working every hour of the day, diligently, under the canopy of capitalism. Pushing through illness, because it’s ‘too important’ to hand over to someone else. Or because we’re the only one who can do it, or it’s just ‘easier’ to do it ourselves.

Before that, I read Emma Gannon’s The Success Myth, which follows a similar discussion, where Emma shares her own experience of packing-up her hugely successful podcast after years of dedicated work, re-focusing her energy onto her brilliant Substack, and generally just going a little easier on herself. She shares how her perspective on productivity has totally shifted, and how she’s working on disentangling herself from her career being tied to her sense of worth.

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I’ve been re-adjusting my compass, too. It’s been a pretty busy few years since my first burnout in early 2017. It was the first time I gave myself permission to actually call myself a writer, even though I’d been writing a blog, and reviews for an arts platform, for a few years at that point, alongside my PR and events work in publishing. It was a couple of years prior that I wrote a memoir piece, about a significant point in my teenagehood, when I realised there could be a work of fiction from this. I gave myself permission to write without expectation, to see what would happen.

I never expected what came next. The voice of a fully-formed seventeen year-old boy, all his colour and light and shadow, his deepest fears and wildest dreams tearing him apart, splashing and bleeding across the pages, soaking the paper faster than I could keep up. He told me his story and I did my best to listen, to get it down. And pretty early on, she came, too. Seventeen, strong as fuck, fierce, and desperately lost and looking for answers. Where are they? Can I help her find them?

They collided and smashed and grated; metal on metal, melting into one another, pulling and pushing in the binary of love.

I gave them everything I have. They are all of me, and I am them.

I wrote as often as I could, through burnout, moving house, trauma therapy. In 2018 I set up a writers group, where like-minded people encouraged me to keep going and I finished the first draft, writing two thousand words per-day, minimum, with weekends off. I set it aside, I went back. I kept digging. In 2019-2020 I did a business course for creatives, and a screenwriting course. I listened to my beta readers. I learnt my craft.

2021-2023 was largely Inklusion – setting up, building a website, creating content, our mission, launching, raising the funds, collaborating, researching, managing, delivering.

Some significant things happened in this time: not least a global pandemic, killing millions of people (mostly disabled). My mother-in-law died during the second lockdown, we couldn’t visit her in her final days. I had to organise a last-minute move for my parents, for whom I care and have done for years. Then, my beloved dad died, the same week as the print version of the Inklusion Guide was launched, in the midst of me penning the bones of a nature memoir.

It’s been full-on. Hence my writing about burnout, and getting through.  

But it feels like I’m coming out on the other side of something. Like I’m perched on a threshold, my compass-point gently vibrating due North. These last few years have carried so many lessons, so many opportunities to look in and to learn. To sharpen my craft, to find my voice and exactly what I want to say. To learn who to trust and when, most importantly myself.

It feels like some kind of making – we’re never ever complete, thank goodness – but much has been broken, and new things are being built in their place.

Resilience, I think is what I’m getting at. Unbelievably, after everything, there it is.

I think it was my characters who taught it to me best. Conjured from some subconscious part of me who wanted to peer behind the veil, to see if I could find it, to ask the deepest, darkest questions.

Losing my dad, taught me it, too. For it began with days of ‘how can I ever survive this?’, when truly, you believe you can’t. Yet, here I am, my love for him still raw and pink and as fresh as the day I lost him.

Resilience is born of hardship, but it too is born of the beating heart of us. It’s love – for ourselves, our pasts, our inner child, our family (chosen or otherwise), our planet and our attempt to soak it all in; that keeps us rooted in the greatest storms.

I’ve been hanging in the in-between for what feels a lifetime right now. But I’m trying; to be present, every day, even if it’s just in small ways. When I spiral down rabbit holes about not finding a house yet, instead I go for a walk, and spy out all the things I wish to grow in my garden. When I prickle about my limited earning capacity, I set my intentions on how I’m going to generate some revenue without overdoing it. When I feel the long hours of working alone, I make a point of going for a coffee and a walk with a friend. When I feel like I’m not yet where I wanted to be, I look back at how far I’ve come.

My therapist uses the word ‘becoming’ for all of this. I think she’s not wrong. It feels like that.

So, rather than say I’m in the in-between, when I’m desperate to jump to the next thing, the next accolade, the next milestone – I will simply say, I am becoming.

Are you guilty of this, too? What does becoming mean for you? I’d love to hear from you x

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The last few days have been fractious. My moods have been undulating, and I'm bursting into tears at the slightest challenge or provocation. Some days I'm happy and at peace; slicing through the glassy surface of the outdoor pool at my gym, the only one there, or I'm sipping a decaf flat white in a quiet café as I write. Other days, I'm overwhelmed by all the things my bodymind is trying to process and the result is that I get stuck: I can't move or think of what to do, and I spiral and end up dissociated and feeling untethered from myself.

PMS and chronic trauma are a nasty mix. As someone who takes carefully calculated measures to stay on an even keel with being autistic, having combined-type ADHD and hEDS, I feel like I've failed whenever something gets the better of me. Eight years after my first burnout and I'm still fighting against internalised ableism.

It's natural for me to want to be active – whether it's going for a walk, a swim, or meeting a friend or getting some work done in a café; I prefer to be moving, to have things to do. But I'm starting to realise that much of that is coping strategy to manage the trauma I've lived with, the CPTSD that never allows me to rest. Ingrained as the more unhealthy behaviours – of pushing myself beyond my limits, of overachieving, of feeling I need to serve others above myself. Partly, of needing to be seen as successful to be valid, to matter, to have a voice. A lifetime of putting other people's needs before my own has made me shout as loud as I can in other ways, to remind myself that I do exist, I do have agency, and autonomy over myself.

Ambition can be a lifeline in a world where there is little self-worth or secure sense of identity. It can give us accolades, drive us to develop skills, help us to feel like we matter in a world not built for us. I have learnt how to put my natural introspection down on a page, to build narratives around the questions I need to ask about my life experiences, which I can find no answer for elsewhere. Ambition helps me to meet myself, somewhere on the page. To give space for my voice and my story be heard.

But I need to be careful that it doesn't become me, that I don't become it.

I am working on feeling valid without these things. I hope they will always be there, and I dream of a long and happy creative career, but it's vital that I don't let it define me.

The same goes for activism. Oh, the toll of activism. It's a hard place to be, to give so much of yourself, over and over. It's incredibly difficult to not take it all on, when you're built to see a wrong in the world and want to right it. Or a space for equity that isn't being filled, and you want to conjure it. It can sometimes feel like the world is on our shoulders and that's not good. No one can carry a planet on their back let alone fix all its problems.

I'm finding myself off-kilter – my central nervous system craving chaos, feeling at odds without constant demands on my time and head-space, but equally requiring utter stillness and recuperation.

The catch-twenty-two of trauma and the bodymind: my whacked adrenals are begging for me to stop, to breathe slow, to hunker onto the mat and stretch and let the ground hold me. The minute I do, my mind throws every unprocessed or still-processing thing at me at once, and I feel like I need to create a solution for each and every one if I'm ever to be still. Throwing myself out the front door, to walk, to be in nature, to feel expansiveness, is how I cope.

My therapist helped me to realise something kind of profound the other day. I do not know what peace feels like. Or security. I've lived in an environment of fear, of 'catching', of keen surveillance, my whole life. I am married to a wonderful partner who offers both of these things (and more) in abundance, but it's never quite equalized where they’ve been lacking elsewhere in my life. There's always, as long as I can remember, been something else tipping the scales the other way.

Recently set boundaries have nudged the balance slightly back toward equilibrium – for the first time in my life – and my bodymind doesn't know how to handle it.

Vigilance is a key quality of mine, conditioned from a young age, useful occasionally, annoying mostly. It's a hard thing to switch-off. It's afforded me resilience these thirty-seven years. But it's no good to be in a chronically heightened state. It takes a massive toll on health.

This is my second burnout since I turned thirty.

The first, I hate recalling. I was so baffled by it. My brain just stopped functioning as it should. I couldn't type an email, I lost a lot of my possessions, and I was crushed by ton-heavy fatigue. My glands kept swelling up, I kept getting sick. The GP had nothing. Nothing in my blood tests. I was told to rest. I quit my freelance PR and events work.

I eventually couldn't leave my flat, even to nip to the supermarket around the corner – I just couldn't get that far. I had to stop every couple of steps (we were renting a tenement flat on the 3rd floor), and it became impossible. My hair thinned, I cut it off, and my guts were in a bad way. It went on for months. I saw a nutritionist who talked about adrenal fatigue. I took loads of supplements and I did what I had to – I rested. Showering and feeding myself were my goals of a day. I couldn't read, so I watched TV.

It took me a year to be able to go for a twenty-minute walk without feeling like I was going to pass out. I took it a tiny bit at a time and I'm lucky that I started to feel something like myself again by the time two years had passed. Many don't get there. Some of us are just always at risk when we overdo it. Covid has brought a wave of people into this awful experience, and we can only hope research will yield some results.

Ambition drove me and my co-founder to some excellent success with the Inklusion Guide – it was as much energy as I'd put into anything since my burnout four years prior. Two years of non-stop work and promotion and fundraising (whilst I was getting assessed for ASD), and the brain fog and fatigue was biting back with a vengeance for both of us. We'd given everything and then some, it was time to be done. Then my dad died. My perspective on life blew wide open.

I'm creeping, slowly, slowly forward. Finding out last year I have combi-ADHD as well as being autistic has led to the realisation that ADHD is the primary cause of the majority of the challenges I face. I love so much of my autie self; but right now ADHD feels like my enemy. Being autistic is just who I am, but in a time of intense grief and unpacking trauma, my ADHD is worse than ever. I can feel traumatic stress eating away at areas of my brain that control moods, daily processes, memory and the fight-or-flight response. I'm having more good days than bad, though; even though the bad still royally suck. I have energy enough to swim, to go on walks, to go to gigs, and find the joy in life. I’ve spent more time with friends these last six months than I have in four years. It’s something I’m incredibly grateful for. But it's squealing up against a huge shift in perspective on my life and fresh awareness of my experiences.

Heavy things aren't easily shaken, this is a re-positioning that's going to take time and tenacity. Where nothing but acceptance of an entire new state of being will do, accepting the bad bits along with the good. The tugs that pull me back down into shadows, knowing I have the tools to reach out and grab the light once more.

It's a pattern of waves, always.

This is, I think, the default combi-ADHD existence – the hyper against the hypo, the need for stimulation and rest at constant odds with each other. An unsteadiness of it's own making, in order to find more stable ground.

I can only it's out there for me, somewhere down the line.

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It took four months before I no longer cried, every single day, after the death of my dad. The first hours, days and weeks were pure, visceral pain; bumping up against hollow emptiness. Losing someone you love is a deep excavation, no one can warn you about the mass of yourself that you lose, all at once; a complete reshuffling of your atomic state. Molecules clinging for new positions around this huge new cavern inside you. I felt utterly detached: from the earth, from him, from myself.

Weeks later, I was howling at times like a wounded animal, frightened by my own undoing. My husband cut calls and meetings in their tracks, leaping through from our study in response to my fractured, keening cries, to find me bent over the kitchen table, or on the floor, unable to move or breathe.

It knocked me sideways, and I was unprepared. I still recall how relieved I was, sometime after the oppressive heat and relentless rain of July had let-up, when I sat down in my therapist’s office and declared I’d finally had a day where I didn’t cry. I thought I was broken, irreparably. How could I be feeling such pain, so raw, for so long? How could I be so dysregulated that I felt I no longer knew how I’d be, minute-to-minute? My trust in my acute body-mind awareness had been utterly shaken and I felt like an unsafe thing to myself.

It could be anything, a memory, a trigger-phrase, most often a song. I think writing memoir over the time that I lost him forced me to sit much closer with the feelings that come with a bereavement, to hold them up and inspect them, tug on the threads and see what unravels. I was deep-diving already, and this sent me into the abyss. There was light, and joy, at times, but mostly just black, pressing in on all sides.

In August, I physically broke. I had three long ASD shut-downs of the likes I’ve never known before. I’d been telling myself it was time, to get back out there – it’s a month full of events and social occasions in Edinburgh – but I was not ready, and my bodymind was doing it’s utmost to make sure I got the memo.

By the time September came round, it was all I could do to listen. Thankfully, the same month where the memoir timeline came full-circle, and I could put the heavy interrogation to rest for a while. I’ve realised that analysing areas of my life is harder work than I anticipated, and it’s taken a toll. The work I’ve been doing in therapy on top of this has been complex, layered, lead-heavy, and unprecedentedly eye opening. This work continues.

So we managed to get through the first, torturous Christmas without my dad, and by the new year I felt new energy, to put into this Substack, which I did for the first few weeks. But like any best laid plans, they gang aft aglay. Not helped by a stint in A&E for severe chest pain, followed by weeks of rest and anti-inflammatories.

There’s something about loss that really makes you take stock of where you’re at in life, and I felt certain that it was time for another adventure, another Rewilding, if you will, for it’s been too long. So my husband and I  decided to realise a lifelong dream of mine to visit Arctic Norway to find the Northern Lights. We went in early February, and I can’t wait to share that experience with you on here very soon. Spoiler alert: we found it. (Oh my, did we find it).

I returned with my batteries brimming with stardust, and I’ve carried it with me, and I will continue to do so. These incredible encounters with nature are my greatest healers, and I pocket them with utmost gratitude.

The twenty-fourth of March marked the year anniversary of my dad’s death, and I’ve been laying low around it. I’m on the Other Side – they talk about this, those who have lost before us – the miraculous line in the sand where the grief shifts behind sea-glass, not as sharp anymore, nor as loud.

I think perhaps it’s about permission: to not remember him all the time, or to not feel bad when I don’t. For me, it’s more about choosing not to let my mind settle on it for too long, rather I let it glance off the surface of my grief, like the stones we skimmed off the water when I was little. The points of contact remind me it’s still there; that connection I feel so strongly to this person who no longer exists in the world. It won’t ever leave me. But I can tap in at my choosing.

I’ve been learning a lot more about the cosmos lately – tuning back in to my childhood obsession, and I’ve been taking comfort in the fact that we can only observe five-percent of the universe. We think we know everything, we create religion to fill in the gaps, but that’s a whole big ninety-five-percent of Who The Fuck Knows. I take my chances that my love for him is still tethered out there, somewhere unseeable, but equally present, in our infinite, more-than-likely-Multiverse.

After all, Space Is Deep, as dad would say (with a twinkle in his eye, as he referenced the lyric from a favourite prog rock band, Hawkwind).

I’m coming to realise I’ve been experiencing a far bigger, wider-reaching, state of rewilding than I could have possibly imagined, but I think that’s the point. We are never fully reclaimed by ourselves, we are always fruiting and growing, pruning what no longer serves, sending energy in and out in a perpetual exchange with our environment and circumstances at any given moment. We can only make assessments when we’ve moved a little farther ahead, and we can look back with clearer perspective.

We have to roll with the tide, carry what we can, and let go of what we can’t.

Through much deep, plate-shifting pain, I think I’m finding my way again.

I hope this brings some comfort to those who have lost and those who have still to. Grief is unique, and we must process it however we need. Wishing you love and light wherever you are x

TW: Death, loss, grief, hospitals

I thought the worst of the pain of you being wrenched from my life was over.

In two days time, it will be ten months since your heart gave it's last beat. I've been gaining inevitable distance from that day, inch by excruciating inch. Happening in the midst of memoirising my life; your death took over the words, forced me to gulp it down like scalding coffee.

To sit with the ugly shape of a world without you, every day, no matter the weather, season, hour, or how much energy I have.

To hold the absence of you, an eggshell in my palm, as I keep mum afloat in her chaos, swim against my own tide.

Talk to doctors, funeral planners, friends, family, your pension fund, the people who sent you emails and bills, who do not know you are dead.

See the unread emails from friends in your inbox, sent the day before, ignoring the belief that their words will resurrect you.

Listen to the golden music you loved that pushed a ten-inch blade through the core of me, to pick five fitting for a funeral.

Dance, just to feel in my body, in my gym shorts on a hot day in my living-room, like nobody can see.

This body has let me down more than once, terrifying, non-verbal episodes of dissociation, of shut-down coming in waves.

We got to the other side of something - left the year behind. But there's danger in closing doors.

Grating, knawing chest-pain reaches peak, day three, I decide to wait no longer.

Pull up at A&E, this is fine, I can handle it.

Sit in reception reading psychology articles on family systems. Wait forever, it's busy for a Sunday night.

Blood pressure taken in the hall, ECG on a hurried bed in a non-stop room.

Hours tick by, doctor comes. I'm just trying to find a room.

Just round this corner, the room where they tried to save you.

I have a room, it's just this way -

Walk past, avert my eyes. Go through doors, 'viewing room' - I whisper to my husband - 'that's where they put him'.

Doctor stops too soon, arm raised, found a nice -

- quiet room - I know the door sign -

no no no no no

shake head, hands over mouth, eyes burn, heart collapses beyond what any stethoscope or bleeping monitor can capture.

'I can't go in there

it's where they told us he died'

Where I held her

instead of letting myself implode

My husband articulates for me.

Kind doctor brings a tissue, gently takes my blood in the hall instead, such care in his hands, once a pianist; now here to witness the red of this pain, to cup it, fill vials with it.

He shades it from my eyes

takes it away

to be tested

in the same room as your blood was

ten months ago

in two days time.

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I still feel like a fledgling in this commune of witches, Selkies, healers and mystical women who share this space with me, their observations and their practices.

Witch was a foul word, a forbidden one, in my home where I was raised by my born-again Christian parents. There was to be no uttering, no contemplation – not even a single, gentle peek inside a little book of spells for girls; purple velvet, with a matching pen attached, perched on the front-facing shelves of Ottakar’s Book Shop on Glasgow's Buchanan Street. My mother said it was bad, we don't entertain such silliness, and besides, the devil hides even in pretty things.

My best friend was allowed to indulge in these things, so I lived vicariously through her. We cast enchantments without knowing it: writing poems, which we chanted aloud, and decorated with doodles of flowers, stars and faeries.

I felt a strong pull to the colour purple at that time, to gold ink, and to pentacles. I had to make do with Groovy Chick stationary instead, and I'd longingly stare at the star-spangled witchy stuff on the shelves, trying to build up the courage to commit this deep betrayal; going over and picking something up. Whenever I managed it, I'd look furtively around, and only get a few pages in before chest-crushing fear came over me and I became convinced some poison had seeped onto my fingers, staining them, and my soul, black for all eternity.

A girl in my year who cast spells and dressed only in black once asked me to write my name on a little bit of paper. Something about how I spelled it. I obliged, then thought twice as she popped it in her bag. My cheeks burned fire when I desperately asked her to return it to me, in case it was for a spell. She laughed slyly, said 'well yeah, but a good one' and I said thanks, but no thanks. I felt like my soul was on that scraggy bit of paper and the relief when she casually handed it back to me was enormous.

One of the more serious conversations with my parents I can recall, was not about contraceptives or stranger danger, but ouiji boards and how I should never, in absolutely no circumstances, no matter how fun it looks, use one. The devil can be summoned and he will get into you.

I’ve never used one. I'm not really interested in calling the dead. The closest experience I ever had to something like it, was my first tarot reading, with the same girl who wanted to take my name home in her backpack. My best friend and I went to her house one day in the summer break, and her best friend, another black-dressing fan of the occult, was also there. They were both nice, friendly and funny girls, and we all got on well at school. The four of us sat on the floor of her room, in her very beige, very minimal home. She was the utter antithesis of this place. She wore smudged kajal, hid her face with two long strands of jet-black, loosed hair, and the atmosphere felt to me as if all the air had been sucked from the room. I shouldn't be doing this. This will be bad. She did a reading for me, and said that there was going to be a huge separation in a long-term friendship sometime in the near future. I looked at my best friend, the shock and fear on her face mirroring my own. 'No way. Not going to happen.' We made our excuses and left. Not long after this incident, our friendship did indeed end, and on my terms – an agonising but vital thing. The anguish of such a severance affirmed my parents warnings of how bad an idea it was to entertain the dark stuff.

Maybe I could see that path because of what the cards showed me. Maybe there was a sense of inevitability that helped me to see how I could take that freeing step. Or maybe that day was what conjured the malignancy which eventually put the nail in the coffin. Who's to say.

I appreciate there are various shades to this thing we call magic, and my being seems to align closest with pagan beliefs and rituals, and the wheel of the year. The connection I feel to the plants, the sea, rocks and stars. The energy between us all, the threads of connection and the tangible, silky thinness of the autumn gloaming.

My knowledge of various magics doesn't cover much ground (astrology for example is something I feel connected to, but I don't know much beyond my own sun sign, with occasional peeks at my natal chart.) I will articulate more a feeling or an observation, and more often find out later through others' shared experiences, that it can be connected to older Pagan and Celtic practises and beliefs.

I found my way back to this playful magic when I started pursue to my authentic self after a brutal, life-altering burnout seven years ago years ago, which saw me pack in my PR job and go rogue as a writer. Still healing, I set up a co-working group for writers, quite a few of whom used tarot cards both personally and as inspiration tools for writing. I was open to whatever energy the universe wanted to send my way, and was embarking on taking action towards the dream of being a writer, so I did a few readings. I felt pleased when they were not only positive, but incredibly insightful. More than that, I came to see that they could be helpful in showing me my deeper feelings about certain topics, and how I wanted my path to go.

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Any cards, be it tarot or oracle, give us an opportunity to re-calibrate our compass as often as required, and to redirect our actions to align with our truth, our desires and needs.

This deep time between Christmas and the end of January is often where I find myself most called to do a reading. I don't have my own Tarot deck, I use two oracle decks – Starseed, for when I feel possible and I want to feel space, or to take big leaps forward; and Spirit Animal Wisdom, for when I need comfort, wisdom, reason, and soul-truth. The Animal cards reveal a lot about where my needs aren't being met and my energy expended too far, and the Starseeds show me where I still want to go, where I've not yet taken steps. The Starseeds deck has it’s own mythology system, which I don’t use, but I can understand that it might be particularly helpful to those who seek a connection to deities rather than simply the mirror the cards hold up to us, the questions they ask, and the energetic pulse of listening to our own intuition.

It's something about the thinness between day and night, the long, dark days and the cooried-up warmth of candles, blankets, thick woolly socks, twinkle lights, and the glow of the windows around me in the neighbourhood; folk all snuggled up like me, that makes me feel safe, secure and part of a community. It's a natural time to want to dive deep. Not least because the wheel has reached it's end and is beginning again.

Who ever said reflection and listening to your inner voice wasn't helpful? I can honestly say I'm so deeply grateful to get to know myself more deeply every time I do a reading. Often I share what I learn with friends, and we talk about what the cards have helped us to see – whether it's something lacking in a relationship, or in work, or a deep want for something that we think is unattainable, or a confirmation of an inkling we've had for some time. There's validation, connection, introspection and a strong awareness of self that's garnered from the relationship we build with these cards, the images on them, the messages they carry.

It's been a few years now that I've referred to myself as a witch. Fellow witches know what this means. You get the knowing nod, the silent acknowledgement of a kindred spirit. I was told by two people on separate occasions, years apart, that I'm a white witch. It gave me permission to entertain the notion that spirituality can exist outwith the realms of religious doctrine, rather, be a playful patchwork or pick-and-mix of various practices that resonate. I've been an atheist since I was eighteen… but I've always intuitively used aromatherapy for healing, meditation for rest, movement for wellbeing, and breathing for connection to myself. I've intuitively lit candles in the dark, uttered soft incantations under the stars, made bowls of steaming saltwater with offerings from my walks, or my herb and spice store.

Sometimes I go months without doing anything, I dip in and out. Usually the dipping out is distraction, and coming back is coming home again.

I did a starseed reading on New Year’s day, which resonated deeply. The cards asked me to think about what I need to let go of, and how to relinquish control and the fears that keep me wound tight. I journaled my responses and formed a pretty clear intention for the year. A couple of days ago, I felt the urge to pull from the spirit animal deck, which invited some questions about more immediate actions, around healing deep, lifelong wounds, finding connection through water, and building community.

The cards told me in short, go to the water, let go, and bring your kin-folk with you.

After three years of the hardest trauma, burnout and loss, as a carer and an activist, my body-mind is asking me to re-center on myself, my physical body, and the friends I feel deepest connections with.

And I Listen.

I’m so grateful to have found other people like me, who are neurodivergent, who are sloughing off layers of trauma into the freezing sea, re-birthing in this mid-part of life with all the messiness and stress it brings. Writers and creatives, beautiful glinting souls, young stars in the cosmic nebula of life. No longer fearful, ashamed, or tired of who they are and how the world has treated them.

We are gathering. Resurging.

This year is so much about letting go.

Essential.

Survival.

There will be many steps to take, but I resolve to be unafraid, to leave my heart open, and to honour the sacred connection with this wondrous earth, as I heal the oldest, deepest wounds.

Thank you for reading this and for being here on this expedition with me.

If this chimes with your soul I’d love to hear from you in the comments below xx

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I decided to share my voice note and transcript with you on this one, just feels a bit more like a conversation between us that way somehow.

Listen:

Read:

Hello, Julie here. I’m out for a walk and it's a really gorgeous, cold beautiful day. Very still. Although the slight breeze does have a very icy chill on it, so I have my Merino buff tucked up right over my chin to try and keep me warm in the fields today. I've been kind of ruminating on the idea of need, and all the forms that it takes and the ways in which society shames us for having needs and for needing things. Oh, it's okay to want things of course: we all should want things – and we should want more and we should have more and we should spend more but as soon as we voice something as a need, suddenly that's a weakness and a shameful thing.

We shouldn't need to need things in a world where we can have anything that we want.

We've just exited a time of the year that's very focused on what people want. Overindulgence and excessive gift giving and worries about ‘is it the right thing’ and ‘what's the best present to get somebody’? And I love it as much as anyone. It's an excuse to really throw yourself into self-indulgence. Which, again… is kind of seen as a shameful thing, and a privileged thing for sure. And I think we can only exist in that window, and in that way, for a short space of time. So for the couple of weeks over the festive break I really throw myself into it. It's the posh biscuit tin from M&S, it's eating cheese boards at nine o'clock at night because I feel like it. It's grilled cheese just for a snack and it's the Gruyere not the cheddar. Just because I want to.

Okay, that's a lot of foody things, but it's also the indulgence of umpteen fairy lights, and candles and everything that sparkles. A house stuffed full of cheer and of light in the darkest time of the year. I think that indulgence can exist in a healthy way. And I think it can be really good for us, if we have the ability to do that. And that's not to say that it's not an incredible struggle and a very difficult time of year for lots of people. I'm very fortunate that my experience can be one where I can choose to indulge, particularly when rest is part of that. Rest is still seen as an indulgent thing, rather than a necessity for human existence.

I thought I'd share with you where this thought came from today. I listened to and met an internal need, or just a need, to feel more grounded and connected with the earth; and also to try and sort out my mild balance and proprioception issues. I got myself a pair of barefoot shoes for the winter which are fleece lined and fully waterproof. And it's a real treat and freedom to wear these shoes, particularly when I'm out in the countryside because it feels heavenly. It's a different kind of indulgence and luxury. It's not four inches of super springy, cushy gel pillows under your feet. It's not hundreds of pounds worth of branding on the side. These are visibly non-branded shoes. And it's completely about ergonomic function. It's not so much about what looks good as well as feels good, but it's dispelling the myth that our feet need to be heavily cushioned and tied up and bound up for our comfort, which actually we now know damages our feet and our overall posture and health, and impacts on our central nervous system functioning. I recommend looking into if you're interested in this kind of thing, but for me… to be able to step outside and not have to think so carefully about where I'm placing my feet, or how my body is aligned, or are my hips swinging and rotating too far.

I have hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and hypermobility can cause me issues. If I'm not walking and moving properly and I wear the shoes, and my feet can really connect with the ground underneath,  they deal with it themselves. It's an automatic response, and my muscles respond accordingly and they don't feel off-kilter at all. For me, that's really, liberating. Traditional shoes actually cause a lot of overcorrection elsewhere in our body to maintain this kind of tilted forward position that normal shoes give us with the raised heel bed. It's amazing that such a tiny thing is having a flat sole; that's tough but thin, cushioned on the inside and malleable and flexible – also there's a very wide footbed so your feet and toes have just all the room to spread, and suddenly I can feel my toes doing their natural thing and they're gripping the ground – this one tiny thing is such a huge deal. I feel so comfortable when I'm out walking.

Disclaimer with bare-foots: you do have to adjust, because our bodies are so deconditioned out of the normal strength in our feet. You've got to take it easy. You don't want to just start wearing them all day every day. I've been building up on a longer walk every few days and it does make me tired when I get home, because I'm working all of these little muscles and accessory muscles that normally are sleeping and the shoes activate those, are which is a really good thing, because that starts to strengthen other most muscle groups in your body and starts to correct your posture.

This is a long way of me saying that it was an indulgence. They’re a bit expensive, but it was meeting and directly saying you need to meet a need. I don't care how they look, I don't care that I'm being told that I should want something else. I care about what my body needs. And I'm serving that need and it feels great, even in this tiny, small way.

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I was walking through the field, at the start of my walk, quite joyously have to say – I was gunning straight through the mud, didn't care a bit, and I saw one of my fellow walkers coming towards me with his dog, and there’s something I've noticed in all these years of walking (although I don't have a dog myself, I get to know other dog walkers and people that are walking the same routes as me). There's usually a very peaceful expression on people's faces when they're out walking their dogs. All the troubles are cleared away. This is the time of day where they have an excuse, because they have got to take that animal out and give it what it needs, and it allows them to get what they need; but in a way that societally acceptable, and in this case of them meeting their pets needs, unavoidable and essential.

If humans were just to go out for themselves, like I do, without a dog for a couple of hours, just to enjoy walking and free up some mental space, I think they would be quite judged for that. And it would be seen as an indulgence, rather than meeting a need. I think can people that manage their own time and who don't work full time often share with each other the fact that they get stick when they're in control of their own patterns in life, and their work life balance. And, ‘Oh, I wish I could just go out for a walk in the middle of the day or take a nap in the middle of the day’. And granted, a lot of the people in my community, the creative community, is pretty neurodivergent and there's a lot of disability and therefore we are people who do need to build our own patterns and factor in rest as an essential part of our existence. But it's so interesting that in wider society, this is still seen as an indulgence, rather than what it is which is very, very much an essential thing of meeting a need. I think that we all can benefit from being a bit more honest and open about our needs and where they're not being met and where we don't have space or room in our lives to try to do that.

Meeting our own needs is an act of self-care. It's an essential thing to do. And yet it's something that we keep hidden, that we feel so shamed for.

It's been one of the most fortifying things in my existence in these last few years, where I've come to find a community of like-minded people with a similar life experience to me, that the mentality is very much it is essential, it is survival to meet your needs, and it's absolutely acceptable and okay.

It's not something we should feel shameful for. I'm very fortunate now that many of the people that I know do the same things as me to get through the day: they take naps, they make little acts of self-care, whether it's cream-topped hot chocolate, or that butter-fried grilled cheese, or a two-hour walk just because they feel like it, or curling up to the sounds of a favourite podcast and having a nap. They're all the small ways in which we take back space for ourselves, that we are so ready to give away to other people. More often than not, that’s to capitalists, and the amount of time and energy and money we put into consuming products, into other people, most predominantly the people that we work for, our employers and colleagues. There is no denying the fact that we live in a world where work comes first.

In a roundabout way I think what I'm saying is, wouldn't it be nice if we could do for ourselves what I can do for my feet? Invite a little bit of grounding. Wouldn't that be a really wonderful thing?

If this resonates with you, I'd love to know how you're grounding, creating space around you and how you're meeting your needs? Or perhaps where you're feeling they're not being met? And maybe you're not sure what to do about that.

There's not always easy answers. But I think the most important thing is having the conversation. If you've made it to the end of this article, thank you so much for listening and for reading. And just for being here, it means the world to me that you're still here. And you're still listening. And I'm hoping to be sharing more ideas and thoughts with you over the coming weeks and months.

Sending you love and light wherever you are x

I’d love to know how you’re grounding and meeting your needs? Please share in the comments below, and with anyone you think should read it xx

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I don’t make a secret of the fact that I’m afraid of winter. I used to panic in October and try to steel myself for the inevitable abyss, which only made things worse. I worship the light that spring brings, and come Ostara in March I’m absolutely salivating at the prospect of the space that’s starting to open up around me again. I begin to believe again in the long, languorous days of summer, filled with hours of that precious photonic-bliss; induced by our altered proximity to our nearest star. Winter tricks me into thinking it was all a dream. Inversely, by the end of summer I worry that I’ll never hear the crunch of snow under by boots, or marvel at frost-fractalled leaves again. The mind is a funny thing.

We gain space in daylight hours, in terms of our productivity, wakefulness, libido, energy, fitness, cognition, capacity — I could go on. I feel so possible in the lighter months. Less pressured to get shit done in just five hours before I’m snoozing again. It’s a time of action and business. But that’s why winter is so essential — we need a place to rest, recoup. (Particularly us AuDHDer’s, am I right? How many little projects did you pick up this year? If the answer is too many, I can guarantee you’re not alone.). It’s why I’ve been teaching myself to ease into it, like a bath, rather than try to harden against it’s coming. Malleability; that’s how I survive winter. I take it as it comes, I respect it’s power, and I am grateful to it for giving me space in a totally different way to summer.

Instead of what I can fit into a day, space becomes about emotional awareness, gratitude, and inner growth. How? It gives us stillness; far-off, inked horizons, thinness. On any given summer day, we’re surrounded by bustle — whether that’s people, events, work, or simply life coming back into the world. The trees are bursting with leaves, the verges with flowers, everywhere you look there’s insect and bird life. It’s a feast for the eyes and the senses: lush, visceral, sensual. It’s external.

Winter erases it all.

It can be a blank canvas, or a turning of the page.

Every year I forget how far away the horizon is. Winter reminds me. I feel my smallness in the vastness of the earth as my eyes trace the horizon from any given vantage point peeked through the bare branches on my walks. This serves as a touchstone, something to hold on to in the otherwise disorientating blackness post-sunset (3.39pm in Edinburgh on the winter solstice!). I need that horizon. I need the thinness of the air, unmuffled by the acoustic cushion of foliage, so that my thoughts can ring out clearly. The horizon gives us a huge sense of perspective, it opens up our minds, and the lack of other visual stimuli and clutter encourages us to look up. Feel awe at the pastel gradients that wash the afternoons, and the slow, steady track of the stars soon after.

I have big feelings about snow, too: winter’s deepest, most quieting and humbling magic, but that requires a dedicated essay of it’s own… (watch this space).

There are many other ways to find expansion, particularly in these anxiety-inducing times.

We’re all feeling the anxiety of the world, it’s impossible not to. And if, like me, your inner world, your immediate world, has provided the greatest worry to you lately, you’re likely carrying the guilt of not giving all the big stuff a bit more thought.

But we are only human, and we can only do so much.

Here are some of the ways I’ve been finding expansion, when life seems determined to contract.

For starters, writing freely in this strange new experiment, where all my favourite people seem to have collected since I launched a year ago (there aren’t enough hours in the day for the sheer beauty, value and insight being shared on here. It blows my mind and you’re all wonderous). It started off with a bang for me last January, I was full of gusto, then two months later my dad died, my caring role for my mother got heavier, and a tidal wave of grief I’ve never known before flattened everything in it’s path. All my plans went out the window, and I couldn’t write. In fact, the first time I wrote again was on here, three months after, and it was about him. I was blocked, and I couldn’t do anything, take another step, without voicing the pain of losing him. It’s been sporadic since then, at best, due to burnout.

But, it’s a new year. A new opportunity to take what it’s shown me about myself and the world, and to write about that. I still, more than anything, want to write. To share feelings and experiences that might strike a chord with you. To just voice it: all the shit, all the beauty, the grit, the wonder. I want to speak. And that’s what I’m going to do.

Another way I’m expanding, is by drawing new, life-saving boundaries, invisible but irreversible. Creating space for transformation within is a power. Especially as monumental, weighty revelations and awareness wash in again and again; ceaseless waves on an undulating tide.

It's taken nine hard months of therapy (on top of past years) to unpick yet more life layers, peel them away like crisped onion skins, printed with the patterns of my life, a protective layer, but ultimately no longer serving their purpose. I'm tender. Between the ribs, below my left collarbone, and there’s a deep, gnawing ache in my hips. My skin may never fully heal from the sharp beak of wisdom, but I patiently, lovingly patch it with the jetsam of nature, until such time as I can gift myself a long rest without the grate of extensive inner work. Now is not that time. I am so close. I've uncovered the frayed edges of deeper things, so now, I know where to tug. This last year has been a mess of uncovering things, running from one place to the next as they appear in a taunting game of whack-a-mole, and I hold my breath until I'm ready to pick them up and properly inspect them, see what they reveal.

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The future is up for grabs: in many ways more uncertain than ever before, and I wobble. There are things I can do to make it more concrete, but they are colossus and I'm Atlas — I don't know if I've strength enough for the expansions and contractions they will bring.

There's also hope. Stupid, futile, life-giving, joyous — painful hope. My old friend, I don't know how to live without you. Maybe these revelations won't obliterate you, but though I adore space, I am no astronaut and cannot exist in a vacuum when all the things I long for are sucked into oblivion.

I come to know that dreams and the unknown possibilities of life are what’s keeping me moving forward through unbearable things. How can I survive, with so much change on the horizon? So much that could be known?

I learn that with age comes less of the wonder and more of the fear. Perhaps earlier for me than others, though I daresay later for me than some. There are points of coming-of-age throughout our life, rites of passage that can’t be free of pain and increased awareness. The further away from innocence, naivety and wonder I become with the drudgery of caring, and unexpected traumas, the harder I fight to find it in other places. I can still find it; condensed on the micro-thin strand of the spider’s web in the cold bite of a winter morning; or woven through white feathers I find poking up from sand on the shoreline, or radiating from the low crescent moon above the inky trees.

It's vital to remember we’re still young. I am a babe in the universe, goggle-eyed at the spectacular fabric of the cosmos, which we’re so privileged just to witness. I'm reminded of Interstellar: how the sheer incomprehensible magnitude of the universe had to be condensed into a recognisable and digestible form — various time-points and memories anchored in a 3D design, so that Cooper could make sense of it — even though every rule had been broken, every belief suspended, and every certainty already disproved. He needed an anchor to help him comprehend his own vastness; the all-consuming nature of his existence, against the hard certainty of his own futility in it all.

Is it all a beautiful, extrapolated metaphor for our incomprehension at ceasing to exist? The utter realisation that we don't in fact matter? How pain is so annihilating, so lived, so intrinsic with living, that we can't imagine it's not worth it, in the end?

You can tell I've been dancing with my own mortality of late, such is the experience around loss, and disabled health. I've lost a parent and a parent-in-law within the last three years, and lost members of my disabled community to the harrowing hierarchy of survival brought forth from a global pandemic, all whilst navigating my own disabled existence within that space, and how that shapes my future.

I have been responsible for other’s lives in my caring role, no small thing (in fact, an exhausting, relentless thing) which has at times turned me into a binary star system, shrinking me as my energy is siphoned by my neighbouring body.

It's a gargantuan task to contemplate our existence, our meaning and purpose, in a way that makes sense to us and doesn't break our minds entirely. (Fitting, that the black hole Cooper falls into is called Gargantua, then.)

How do I move forward, if I'm afraid of what the future holds? How do I find meaning, before the inevitable (and hopefully far off) end? How do I keep going, when so much feels impossible, and the world is broken?

By creating room around me to contemplate, to muse, and ponder the great unknown. But also to root, to find the threads and pull me back to solid ground. However small, or fragile they seem.

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Being a Gemini, air is my element: I spend a lot of time with my mind in the stars, the sky, the clouds and the great beyond. But Pisces is my rising sign, and I am always pulled by the unfathomable, immutable depths of things. I feel a strong connection to water: the way it can be liquid one minute, you pass through with little resistance, and totally solid the next, impenetrable, but translucent. A contradiction, in the most abundant compound on earth. Given we are mostly made of water, I think it makes sense that I can be many different states on any given day. Maybe you can be, too.

I also think it's why it calls me, when I don't know the answers or where else to turn. I go to the water, where I am buoyant, weightless, suspended in a welcome pause. I hand it over, whatever it is, to the water, and let it be carried away… if only for a moment. I am brought back to presence, to feeling support against my skin, on every inch, under every pore; such needed lift.

I climb out, go about my day, and lean into the space afforded by feeling held.

Later, I smile inwardly as I sip my water, crunch fractals of salt between my fingers tips to season my food, in the reverent knowledge that it’s all just cycles, molecules exchanging in a pendulum swing, back and forth across the membrane of life.

I am the universe.

The universe is me.

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Does this resonate? How are you creating room to expand? In what ways? What’s helped you? What’s limiting you? I’d really love to hear from you in the community comments below. If this resonates or makes you think of someone, I’d love if you could share it, too.

If you’ve made it here, thank you so much for reading this — your support helps me to keep going with this Substack. And please let me know in the comments if there’s any particular subject or question you’d like me to write about, I’m curious about what you’re curious about :)

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It's a new year and I'm squelching through the mud in the field: it feels like a far too obvious metaphor that the events of last year are still clinging to my boot soles.

It's been a few years since I made the conscious decision to stop putting pressure on myself during this time of year. It's a conversation that's happening across social media platforms just now: that we all feel that pressure to become our best selves by hitting the gym, or saving for that holiday, or doing that massive project that's been waiting on some dedicated time. It can be healthy to have goals to anchor us and keep us moving, but it’s equally healthy for us to stop, ease-up and be kind to ourselves in this time of natural hibernation. To send out gratitude, even when it’s hard.

I’ve been coming to see what’s been an essential anchor for me in past years—the narrative we prescribe to ourselves through the seasons and the wheel of the year—as smaller weaves in the larger fabric of life, rather than defining chapters within themselves. It's all part of one endless, infinite loop. A pulsing figure of eight tipped on it’s side, a ceaseless exchange and transfer and continuation of energy.

It's helped me to accept that events in my life can’t be tied off in neat little compartments; that they bleed back and forward, into past, present and future. Painful things can be behind me, but it doesn’t mean they don’t still hurt, or impact me. In the past I would have been tempted to try leave it there, which can be very useful, in terms of helping us to move on and redefine ourselves, what we want and need. At this moment however it’s healthier for me to feel that the awful event of losing my dad last year is still not too far behind me.

I will face the anniversary of his death in March, a year that’s been both impossibly fast and slow all at once. A year of firsts. We just about managed to make something of Christmas, difficult and odd as it was. But it’s too soon to bundle it all up and not look back. It also feels like an insult to him, to the love we all shared, after all, love doesn’t stop just because life does. More than that, grief is taking up so much space that I want to allow myself to feel it, to process it.

I haven’t been out on my walks as much as I wanted these last few weeks, with the weather being vile—uncharacteristically for Edinburgh which usually delivers a nice cold, clear winter, for the most part. At least until the storms arrive on this side of the season. I’ve also been wading through treacle with grief, depression, unusually high anxiety and caring roles, both for my mother and my own self. Nature being my go-to antidote, it sucks when it’s unavailable to me (and no, I’m not hardy enough to bundle on the Gore-Tex and go out, for me it’s about space and feeding all my senses: torrential rain and sleet hammering on plastic over my ears just don’t deliver).

There have been pockets of stillness and magic amongst the hustle and bustle of festivities; a few stolen, frost-bitten days that hit the reset button, if only for a day or so. Hours spent with kindred souls, sharing our light and shadows by the glow of the tree and fairy-lights, wandering around the Christmas Market, nose-pinked and wine-warmed. My husband and I took my sister and mother down to London in early December which took a lot of planning, time and energy, but was worth it for the space it gave us all, to soak up the Christmas spirit and have some fun. The Christmas lights there are second to none, and when we turned onto Carnaby Street on our evening stroll, it felt something like stardust for this space-loving-kid who finds her dad in the stars. (Incidentally, I did actually see stardust, literal, real stardust, at the Natural History Museum. A faint whisp of greyish powder in the bottom of a tiny vial, made from microscopic diamonds that formed around dying stars, long before our solar system was born. The most ancient thing I’ll ever see. I’m pretty sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere).

The natural thing for me is to hibernate in winter. I just cannot keep myself awake. I think a lot of people relate to that. It's a feeling of total stupor and sluggishness that's pretty much impossible to get on top of. I have a powerful SAD lamp which has really helped me these last couple of years, but I’ve not been at my desk so much since October, and it hasn’t occurred to me to bring it to wherever I am to give myself a blast. I’ve been making the effort to get out again now the weather’s improved. I’ve just been letting myself need the quiet and the still. I, along with most disabled or neurodivergent people, tend to hold myself against a pretty impossible standard. A lifetime of conditioning to believe that we are less, worth less, as humans, because of our impacted productivity and output has done a number on us, and when our bodies and minds are screaming for us to just stop, we tend to keep pushing. At least that’s my default. So in line with this understanding, I am consciously taking daily action towards rest. Whether it’s reading for an hour, watching a video on YouTube, snuggling my cat, or just now, recording this transcript with my feet five-inches deep in congealed mud, determined to find a way through, before retreating home again.

It’s not always easy, and I’m working hard on learning to draw boundaries, see where I can let go of control. It feels alien, unnerving, but an utterly essential part of being.

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How do you rest? What does this look like for you today? Does any of this chime with you? X

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I find myself too soon facing the longest night. It feels incredulous to me that it's been a year since I shared the profound moment of epiphany about my family, such a vast thing it was for me to contemplate. To realise without question the role I've been upholding, my whole life, and to choose to release it, was nothing short of transformative. Something tightly bound to the solstice: a tipping point, a slip of the lens which changes the angle of the light and the shape of the shadows it throws up.

It was a galvanising moment which opened up space around me, the less

ons and realisations came full throttle after that pivotal point. I was becoming.

Today, a full turn of the earth later, the relief of the land under my feet is unrecognisable. A traumatising year has blown through with such a force as to erase the surface entirely. I stand here and contemplate the earth without my dad. A year of firsts: my birthday, my sister’s birthday, his birthday and father's day, culminating now, at our first Christmas without him. A time of year which historically was good for my family. My mum gets credit for all the beautifully wrapped gifts, abundant, thoughtful, all managed without much help from my dad. They’d twinkle enticingly through the mottled glass living-room doors first thing in the morning. My sister and I would sneak down as kids, to see the blurry picture of what had appeared overnight. Later in our teen years, we'd all bring our gifts down on Christmas eve, chatting about everyone's wrapping and what could be inside, before cuddling up with tea and Raymond Briggs' Father Christmas.

My dad made it special for us in his own way: being obsessed with music he made us a Christmas Turkey Tape, a compilation cassette, when we were little, which progressed onto the Christmas Cracker CD, and eventually the Songs for my Stocking USB. It was very much appreciated and the first thing we'd do before opening our gifts was to put on the new playlist to accompany our merry-making. Jethro Tull, James Taylor, Barclay James Harvest - Taylor Swift and Foo Fighters. He loved and shared it all and it's why I love music, playing it, listening to it and going to see it live.

In recent years Christmas has been tainted with my dad's surgeries, both my parents anxiety and depression, but we did our best with it. It seems since he left, I focus more on the good times. They say that happens. So here I am remembering the highlights, and wishing he could be here with us.

There has been a lot of deep work this year, I've been seeing a counsellor weekly since he died, and it's opened a necessary and overdue dialogue with myself about where I put my energy. Interrogation isn't for the faint hearted though and I'm tired, I feel fragile.

Normally, I feel full of intention this time of year, instead I feel flat, worn out and at odds. I think that's okay, though. Burnout is an old pal of mine, long before I understood what I was experiencing. These last few years have been too much, generally, and this year has been heavier than I could have ever imagined, for reasons I don't feel ready to share yet. I’m also still getting used to what being autistic and having ADHD mean for me in times of stress.

I take what grounding I can from the mulched leaves under my feet, from the pale, vast blue sky, and nose-pinking whip of the wind that's sending white horses galloping towards me.

I say ‘hi, I miss you’, once more to the waves and the water that carry his story: from embarking here on voyages that took him around the world, to returning here with mum years later to start a family and a life onshore.

The gulls cry with me, swooping over the charged surface, the curlew frees its peeling song above the distant boats. I am not religious, but it's here among the flotsam and jetsam and froth, with my fingers numb to the bone, that I feel closest to him and all that he was and still is.

And so another year closes, on another impossibly beautiful day, and I will hold him close on this longest night.

I don't know what's on the other side: light, shadow, more pain – it's unknowable. No point trying to control it, if anything, perhaps my greatest lesson this year has been to resist less. See where the current takes me if I stop trying to shape it so much. Not easy, breaking the habit of a lifetime, but I'm trying. And that's enough.

Wishing you love, light and peace wherever you are x

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I woke up this morning just before six-am, after a troubled and fitful sleep. Sometimes I wonder if our bodies are hardwired to understand and perceive things well beyond our conscious awareness. It's been a rush of social engagements and autistic meltdowns these last couple of weeks. After another tiring day yesterday, which culminated in a deeply probing therapy session, I crawled into bed at eleven-pm to read a few pages before lights out. But it’s not really possible to only read a few pages of Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun. It’s my first time reading it, after years of saying I will, as seems to be the way these days with most of the books I read. I’m always catching up.

The way that Amy writes about the blurred, hazy, yet visceral days that she spent in London in her youth, whilst she surviving an ongoing mental health crisis, only serve to rattle my already fraught nervous system, as it mirrors the tangled, messy, scramble of feelings I’ve been processing lately. It sets my teeth jangling and I drifted into a restless sleep.

I tugged out of sleep, my lower back aching badly, my mind racing and my heart beating too fast. The pain had eased off almost entirely over the last few months, with me not being at my desk much. But for the last six weeks I’ve been submitting to various things, with the biggest deadline tomorrow. I’ve been trying my utmost to bully an active project into the shape of a pitch, but people with ADHD are notoriously bad at this. My mind has been so smashed to bits of late, which doesn’t help matters.  

I've been diligent. I've been working away at my desk or my kitchen table as often as time and headspace allows. It takes all my focus, and exercise and relaxation have mostly gone out the window which is taking its toll. I'm looking forward to getting a handle on things again. I was only diagnosed officially with ADHD a week ago, after a long wait again, and a private assessment. I'd like to try medication, knowing that it's helped a lot of people, including friends of mine. There's a few reasons just now why I can't, though, which is incredibly difficult given how much I’m impacted by it. My mind is frazzled. My body is tired and janky and I've been having more fitful sleep, struggling to get over and it's been a mix of five or six-hour sleeps, exhausted days, and then total crashes and ten-hour sleeps, with a two-hour nap on top.  

Last night was different. Possibly because my body and mind are aware that this deadline is coming up. But I think maybe that there's more to it than that. I realised only this morning as I headed out of the door that it’s exactly five months ago today since my dad died.

I didn't plan to post on here specifically on this day, but I have been meaning to post again. Life happens and death happens and grief doesn't follow rules. I haven't had the capacity. But yesterday in a serendipitous connection, I was introduced to an author I admire and look up to, who quickly told me that they subscribe to this Substack, and how much my writing struck a chord with them. It meant the world to hear this. We bare our souls and we’re not sure who it’s resonating with. This was as sure a sign as any to keep going.

A silver lining to this morning’s troubled wakening, is that it’s given me an extra couple of hours in my day to get out for a walk, first-thing, which has given me space to write this as I stroll under the vibrant green patchwork of leaves that criss-cross above the path. This is my first early-morning walk in a few weeks, due to sleeping later, and needing slower mornings. I’ve also had a new compulsion to get up and throw on my gym kit in these last few weeks, sticking on an upbeat playlist and dancing like my life depends on it in my living-room. Getting my heart rate up, sweating, jumping, leaping and singing along lifts my mood considerably, and importantly, raises my heart rate to its peak levels. My resting heart rate has been living somewhere between 70 and above 100bpm on quite a consistent basis for the last couple of years. And when I exercise, it brings my average resting heart rate down to around 64 bpm. This helps all manner of things going on in my body and it was resulting in better sleep, improved appetite and satiety, and reduced anxiety.  

It's another thing that's gone out the window in these last few weeks of submissions. My heart rate has been slowly creeping up, and just yesterday reached a disturbing high of 130bpm whilst sitting at a table socialising with good people. This does not signal that the socialising itself was a bad thing, rather, that my wrung-out nervous system is rather fragile at this point in time. It’s my body saying, ‘hey, we’re overwhelmed here, can you slow down?’

It isn’t surprising, given I had a dreadful meltdown last week (that’s what us neurodivergent people call too much stimulation resulting in nervous system overwhelm and often shutdown). I’ve been cautious not to do too much, or interact too often since. This is challenging, because as a writer I spend a lot of time with myself, and I thrive on social connection. Meeting friends charges the batteries as much as it depletes them in other ways. We have to constantly be vigilant in striking the balance.

I’ve been working on rounding-up the memoir these last few weeks, and it feels like the last big push, as I approach the timeline connection point, having started in in September last year. It’s been hugely enlightening to be existing in a space where I'm writing a memoir that in part documents my daily, lived experience. It’s surprised me: starting as one thing, in a particular form, that changed utterly after my dad died. Writing it has taught me so much about myself.

This space is about sharing what I've learned, as I slowly come out of the ether after putting all my energy and focus into that work. I hope to spend more time connecting with you on here.

As always, nature has been keeping me grounded throughout this tumultuous period, an ever constant reminder of the trickle of time. Just a few days ago, the field I’m standing in was tall and bronzed with dried out Oil Rapeseed, pods rattling in the breeze. I’m surprised to find it now already threshed, the dark brown soil freshly turned, awaiting new seed.

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I’m looking forward to connecting – this is what I'm here for. If this resonates please leave a comment below, it would be great to hear from you x

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Call it magic

Cut me into two

And with all your magic

I disappear from view

And I can't get over

Can't get over you

Still I call it magic

Such a precious jewel

And I don't, and I don't, and I don't, and I don't

No, I don't, it's true

No, I don't, no, I don't, no, I don't, no, I don't

Want anybody else but you

- Magic, Coldplay 

The simple melody fills my ears and I feel a powerful urge to pick up my guitar and play it instead of listen. A difference between us: you were always listening, and eventually, I was always playing. It seemed fitting that you should have a musical child, given it was your lifeblood. Rhythms beat through your veins, not stopping even for sleep, when your left foot would twitch in perfect time with whatever song was playing. When I got to your flat and you were in the gurney I looked at you from the feet up, like maybe there would be a sign of life to contradict your silent, staring eyes. They are mine, so I was shocked by the brightness of their blue, normally deep and dark. 

I always wondered why you didn't ever play an instrument, but I think it was more about the lyrics for you, and the escape. For me, I lose myself completely in the vibrations, the feel of something I'm creating. No matter what I sit down to play, I end up making it my own, can't help it. You always watched me with a hidden smile and a twizzle of your moustache—as much emotion as you were able to show, but your praise was rich, and it meant so much to know you enjoyed it. I think you were really chuffed to have produced a kid who could play instruments without being taught. 

I wrote a song for you, in the days after. I don't know why I hadn't done it before. It's unfinished. 

Such is grief. 

The balmy notes wash over me, and Chris Martin's gentle words, 'I don't, no I don't, no I don't, no I don't / want anybody else but you', swing a granite fist into my belly. Right now all I want is to have my dad back; sitting in the den under your cans, foot tapping away, beer in hand, as you create another playlist for me, weaving and connecting some story with titles and lyrics, as is your way. 

I search for your profile on Spotify, scroll frequently through your created playlists. 'Lost at sea', 'Keepsake', 'Nothing is Ever as it Seems', 'Music is the Tongue I Speak', 'Harboured a Hope'—'Your Life is a Record'. The last one you made was 'Coast', when you moved here. Your final homecoming, the one you knew would stick, where the troubles that had dragged behind you would finally dissipate, after fifteen fraught years. But then mum broke and needed help, and they messed up her meds, and it wasn't the golden final flash you wanted, strolling the shore as you clung to her, limpet-strong. The Café's were out because you needed your safety cup by then to help you drink. You didn't want your friends to see you—you hadn't told them how advanced your disease was—and you were resistant to helping yourself. 

Time defies all will, and yours slipped too quick. 

Somehow in death, everything is more entangled. I find myself trying to figure out the timeline of things, to see where the knots lie. Betty and Jack, your parents who I never met, both gone by the time you were twenty-eight. It must have been utterly devastating, so loved as you were. And then there was mum's truth, a black pearl in the oyster. No shucking to move it. 

I try to figure out this quiet, observing man; a sentimental poet, who fell hard for his love, who ached with the absence of his family. I read and re-read the poem you wrote for your dad when he died. I can't write one for you myself, this is all I need. 

I will look to the hills, old man. 

And because you taught me how, I will find you in the stars, too. 

Just as I promised, when my fingers traced your warm collarbone because I couldn't look at your unseeing eyes, when I said goodbye and thank you.  

There won't be a song line that doesn't make my heart thump for you, a smile of an unborn babe that doesn't ring of you, a sighting of a distant shoreline that isn't a reflection of you. 

You are everywhere.  

'And if you were to ask me

After all that we've been through

"Still believe in magic?"

Oh, yes, I do'. 

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I didn’t know how to write this. I kept going back through the voice notes I’ve been making on my walks, the tiny revelations I’ve been having. Wondering how to string them all together into something coherent. But sometimes, things are meant for just that moment. It makes no sense for me to try and force some order from the last six weeks. What I can do, is talk about where I am now, and reflect a little on how I got here.

I’m a fan of the up-close detail of things.  Hence the previous posts on here, capturing feelings and thoughts whist I’m still in the midst of it. But I think it’s helpful, and enjoyable, to take a bigger picture view, occasionally. Particularly when we’re doing a lot of inner work—whether grappling with demons, or celebrating a diagnosis and what it means for us, or just trying to align with our values and passions. Things which pull our focus down. It can be helpful to see inside someone else’s lens and process, because it holds up a mirror, and allows us to see things in ourselves.

But today, I feel more like an observer, having been able to simply watch, rather than interrogate, this chunk of time since I last wrote. I’m in a better place, a gentler one. And it’s thanks to an opportunity I had to retreat from the world.

I had grand plans, folks.

I was going to write to you from my last-minute escape to the incredible Moniack Mhor, at the very end of January—but as it turned out, I just lived the experience instead. I let it absorb me, in an osmosis that can only happen in the ether of kindred spirits. Other creatives, who were there to focus on craft, on wellbeing, and gratefully, on connection. Our group was on the smaller side—the retreat has a capacity for fourteen or so people, and we had eight. It felt just right. Particularly given this was the first time I’d spent time away from home with a group of people (I’m autistic). We got to know each other quickly, sharing stories of our lives, of illness, love and loss, and of course, the woes of writing.

I arrived, a shell in the blackness of the night, bleary-eyed and exhausted. The welcome was warm, steamy (we arrived in the kitchen) and full of the glow from a roaring fire and candlelight. I didn’t have time to process as I was shown to my room, where I made a hurried attempt at unpacking and making myself presentable for dinner. A table-full of smiling faces greeted me as I entered the communal dining and living space, where we were introduced to the staff and each other, before being served a hearty meal. I tried to focus on the conversations around me, whilst grappling with the enormous feelings about being here, to write, just for me, at the kindness of others, and being so looked after.

It was like a giant hand had reached down from the sky, scooped me up and wrapped me in rose petals. Placed them gently over my bleeding wounds. For bleeding is how I felt, raw, after my parents simultaneously entering mental health crisis in the New Year. Being on high alert (an almost continuous state these last couple of years) had knocked the crap out my already smashed adrenal glands, to the point where my hormone pathways were not behaving as they should. And that affects everything else. I’ve been here before, of course. Many of you will understand what I’m talking about (waves to the people reading this who I know will get it).

My bodymind was demanding me to just stop.

I listened. Desperation pushed me throw caution to the wind.

And so it was, that I was able to sit with ghosts of my past in the peace and stillness of that expansive valley, cocooned in the warm silk of the shared experience of the beating hearts around me. Nestled between old walls that seem to have the capacity to leach away what ails you. I dug into the hardened dirt of my history, which I’ve had little cause to look at outside of therapy, and I teased it until it softened enough that I could make lines with it on the page.

Our days functioned around the kitchen clock, we’d write and then stop for sustenance; the help-yourself brekkie, glorious lunch spread and hearty dinner (prepared by a team of housemates, so each person only has to help out with cooking one night). Our evenings were spent chatting over coffee and cake at the table, before we retired to the couches by the fire. Everyone was interesting, everyone had a story to share. We all made recommendations to one another, and we made sure to circle and spend time, one-on-one with each person.

I was astonished to learn that the retreat is just along the road from Abriachan—a place I had long wanted to visit, since first reading Katherine Stewart’s ‘A Croft in the Hills’ many years ago. She’s a huge part of the reason why, along with childhood holidaying, I talk about my fantasies of living in a highland cottage in the woods. I can still remember the day I picked it up in the bookshop. I’d been scouring the shelves for something that might have the same magic as Gerry Durrell’s ‘My family and Other Animals’ or Lilian Beckwith’s hilarious ‘Loud Halo’ series, or Winifred Foley’s ‘Shiny Pennies and Grubby Pinafores’. Books my mum loved, and which I wanted to find more of. Entertaining, accessible reads. I saw A Croft in the Hills sitting front-faced, the title jumped at me, and I grabbed it, wondering if this was some shepherd’s tale of rearing his sheep, or something altogether different, and just right for me. It was the latter. The story of a young couple who had become depressed and tired of the oppression and mundanity of city living, who threw caution to the wind, and made the move to a northern highland croft, overlooking Loch Ness. I delighted in their stories about pigs in the garden, four-foot-deep snow blizzards, and the first sightings of larks in the spring. Katherine described the world I the way I experienced it—with wonder.

I overheard a fellow housemate mention the name in conversation with a neighbour of the retreat, who stayed in Abriachan. I almost choked on my lunch.  They told me it was just a short drive away. I don’t have a car, and it was bitingly cold outside for a couple of hours walk, so I vowed to come here again so I could see it in warmer weather. But I got talking to the neighbour, Mairi McFadyen, who was chatting with Norman Bissell, an author on retreat to write about Geopoetics and leaders in the movement, one of whom was Katherine Stewart. It was one of those moments where you just feel like this was meant to happen.

There were many moments on the retreat where I felt like I was meant to be here, now, to meet this group of people, and we’ve become friends. Such is the gift of the time, space and support to write. The gift of a fireside, just asking us to sit a while, have a heart-to-heart. I was so comfortable I even played the retreat guitar, and sang ‘Green Grow the Rashes, O’ unaccompanied, bolstered by the incredible talent of other housemates. (I’ve played and sang my whole life, but never for other people.)

I stood alone in the darkening garden on our last night, watching the clouds drifting overhead, the warm lights from the centre and the little cottage and hobbit-house casting shadows on the ground. My fingers grew stiff around my coffee cup. The moon climbed higher, until by some fate, it hung directly above the house; ‘beautiful only when the mind is seeking beauty and the heart is loving’. The dancing, singing and fireside readings that came soon after were of deepest magic, memories I won’t soon forget.

It’s been the hardest thing, to carve out time for myself and for my creativity, these last two years with Inklusion. The hours ended up being full-time, though we only applied for funding for two days each a week, so we’ve been functioning underpaid and overstretched for most of that time. It takes a hefty toll. Creativity hasn’t had any room at all. The only reason I’m attempting to write a memoir now is because an amazing author asked if they could mentor me, when we met at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August. They wanted to start in October. I started talking myself out of it, worried about burnout, but I realised this was a thing you don’t say no to. More than that, I realised I am still a fucking writer, above anything else. I needed the accountability. And the guidance, because I knew what I wanted to write, how I wanted to write it, and that it was going to be one of the hardest things I’d do. I needed someone who knew the genre, and who could prepare me for the toughness of writing hard things.

And so we started, in November, after the guide was due to be out, and I found the threads. But things kept getting delayed with our partner publisher, knocking the edges of my brain. I think the not knowing about the state of things is worse for your headspace than knowing how long is still in front of you. I kept having to shift things around, when I was diving into some of the worst experiences of my past in my writing. Such efforts are rarely beneficial until some time after the process, and I was exhausted at the effort. By the time the end of January had rolled around, still in the midst of my parents crisis and still no guide, I felt hollowed-out. I did not want to give this up, I was so close. I’d had some of the most profound realisations about my life and my autonomy, in the short time I’d been mentored, crucial to the anatomy of the book.

Moniack Mhor was the beginning of something, some finding of myself when I was feeling like a ghost. It rebuilt me as a writer and a human, first and foremost. It reminded me that no matter how much people want from you, you must chose carefully what you give. In all aspects of your life. Surround yourself with people who value you.

It reminded me we all have a voice and it is valid. To write, is valid. A joy. An absolute necessity. I’ve said it a hundred times and I’ll say it a hundred more—who are we, without the media we consume? The music and the movies we so love. The self-help books, the memoirs that hold a mirror up to us, the romance that makes our toes curl, the sci-fi that takes us entirely out of ourselves, the video-game (Zelda fans, I nod to you) that transports us to another realm where we get to be the hero for days on end? There is a creator behind everything.

There are so many barriers preventing marginalised artists from creating work. I think we know by now we have the most to learn from the experiences that are wildly different to our own. That’s why it’s imperative that we seek and share marginalised voices and experiences. That we value them most highly in our regard, and do our utmost to dismantle barriers held against them. That we create spaces which nurture and support them.

I am deeply grateful to the wondrous team at Moniack Mhor who gave me the chance to come back to myself at a time of great need. Much like my mentor, I hope to pay it forward someday soon, by creating opportunities that support disabled writers, properly, and which recognise the impact of caring. As I’ve said before, sometimes the nurturer needs nurturing.

And because it seems to be the post with all the hyperlinks, I’ll once more remind you that if any of this hits home or resonates, know that you are not alone.

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If you liked this read, please do hit the the heart icon at the top or bottom of the post. It would be great to hear from you, please say hi in the comments. Maybe we could share with each other, times when we’ve felt supported, or most challenged, what’s brought us back to ourselves, and what we’re fighting to keep? As always, I’d love if you could share it Xx

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It's the end of January. We made it—by the skin of our teeth—but we're here. I've been wading through sticky, dark treacle, trying to find some thread of creativity and hang on to it for all it's worth.

Caring and work responsibilities, dragging deadlines, and finalising the launch of a long-term project have seen the days drumming by me, as I try to realign with myself, and what I want from life, amidst it all. I’m feeling fulfilment, too; launching this newsletter platform for one thing, which I hope will bring me the connection I crave, the space to be vulnerable and honest. We are about to turn into February, which holds just that little bit more room and hope than January; which is often bleak, in direct contrast with all the intensity and shine of December. The pressure to get gifts, to wind up work for two weeks, be on top things, face family and all that brings; the caverns it opens and asks you to peer into. January is a tough, empty month, where the repercussions of the festive season take time to abate.

It's also where we internalize the idea of transformation and renewal, putting a lot of pressure on ourselves, even if we don't consciously buy into that ‘new year, new you’ thing. We're conditioned to feel it has an opportunity for change—that's not a bad thing because anything that invites you to reassess, to take stock and trim away what doesn't serve you, find more of what does—that can lead to great things. That’s not to say it’s easy work, however. The reward often comes later, from following your truth and identifying what aligns with that.

These last couple of days I have been the living embodiment of that; I’ve thrown caution to the wind and reached out to someone, been honest about how much I’m struggling to focus on my writing just now, and asked if they could they help. They could. And now I’m finding myself entertaining the frankly luxurious prospect of a retreat, away from it all, all the stresses, responsibilities and deadlines—imminently. Time. To relax, talk with others, eat, walk, think. Write what I need to write. Do the deep, gutting excavation of my history and stand face-to-face with it in the solitude of the hills and open sky. I’ve never been away on a retreat before, I’m nervous, but more than that, I am desperate. The fear of travelling alone, of booking last minute tickets, packing and spending a few days in the company of several strangers are all eclipsed by need. Transformed, to shiny pebbles I want to pocket. The prospect has morphed so easily into one I am outright thirsting for.  Being autistic and having ADHD be damned.

It occurs to me that sometimes we don’t know what we need until we’re at a breaking point. When suddenly the light shifts and the land has an utterly different relief from the moment before. When insurmountable things, impossible things, selfish things, become necessary.

I want to share with you something that I think is highly indicative of the moment we're living in. To me, it's very poignant. There are three phrases that have been coming up again and again in my conversations:

These words are power. I used to speak them only with my closest friends, but now I'm finding them coming back to me from different and sometimes unexpected places. The feeling is always mutual. It makes me question if we're not always voicing our gratitude as much as we should. Sharing that we recognise and can empathise deeply with someone's pain and experience. I know how it makes me feel when people say this to me. It's finding a kindred spirit. It's very fortifying in tough times to be reminded that you are valued and connected, that you are not going through this alone.

Anyone who lives with anxiety, panic, dissociation, neurodivergence—will know that any of these myriad things can interrupt and disrupt our brain patterns, our perceptions of ourselves. That they have the power to make us feel isolated, shut us down. We can learn tools, like CBT, or we can go to therapy: we can learn about ourselves. We can ready these new tools, wield them like weapons, but sometimes, the demons sneak in. Humans aren’t perfect.

These cycles can be particularly hard to navigate when you’re a voice for your community, and you spend time and energy bolstering others or fighting for justice, when you feel like a failure, or an impostor, because it becomes hard and you feel imperfect.

I’d argue it's our own perfectionism that makes us entirely unique and who we are. And it's our imperfections where we learn our greatest lessons and resilience. If, like me, you are amazed that it's the end of the month and that, no, it didn't go on forever— thank fuck—and, was that actually an extra five minutes of tangible daylight? Then give yourself a huge pat on the back. Because you survived another January. You are nearly towards the end of winter: at least the light is coming. And hopefully you've been able to manage the shadows a little bit, if not cast them completely aside, because let's face it, that's just not always possible.

I hope you’ve found a space that allows you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, the map of you, and that you can trace what energies you’re aligning with. Sometime, it takes huge directional force to create change. Surrounding yourself with like-minded people, who you can bounce off, elevating yourself to a higher level, can help. And it can be achieved in the smallest of ways—an extra hour tacked on to your Friday, for journaling, or just free-writing. Maybe you'll pick up a memoir, or challenge yourself to pick up something you don't normally read.

Transformation and renewal isn’t only about saving up for a new class at the gym. For me, it’s been the effort to get outside more often again. I’ve been pretty glued to my desk these last two years, and I’m feeling it, physically, mentally, emotionally. Being outside again, to walk freely, at my own pace, without the constant tug to be responding to work, has had a considerable impact on my wellbeing, already. It has felt as though a huge part of me has been missing, and it’s slowly being restored, through every touch of a frost-encrusted leaf, weighty swing of a round pebble into the sea, or keening cry of a buzzard, high up above.

Additionally, I’ve been putting myself out there more. Releasing fear, seeking places that allow me to be unafraid. Like this one. It’s where I can speak honestly, share truths, and find the points that chime and resonate with you (I really love hearing from you). I’m recalibrating and shedding the layers, the old skins. I’m picking up autumn leaves and pocketing them, sticking them to my coat, seeing which colours I like best. Which shapes are my favourite.

I think that we humans build up layers and layers of membranes that are responses to life and the things it throws at us. It could be any number of things: perceptions, that other people have given us about ourselves; or idealisms about how we want to be; or even armour, to survive. We sometimes require a conscious shedding of those skins, to get back to who we are at the core.

It’s possibly more common for neurodivergent people who typically masks to survive: you get very adept at picking things up from other people to in order to fit in. And we maybe have to work that bit harder at chipping those things off again, but it can be done.

If you’re working on finding your truth, or a way back to the core of you, I hope you’re being kind to yourself and finding rest and stillness where you can. That you are taking a moment to breathe: in for four, hold for four, out for eight, is how I do it when I feel untethered. It helps if the air is fresh, better if it’s carrying birdsong. Breathing is often what brings me back to myself faster than anything. It’s what allows me to reset, and begin again.

Next time you feel stressed out or at odds with yourself, try it. You’re breathing in a world of connection, a million other people, breathing with you.

I’m glad to have met you. I hope you’re you’re taking care of yourself. And you are not alone.

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I’d love to hear from you if this makes sense, touches a nerve or strikes a chord, basically if it resonates. How do you find your alignment? What brings you closer to yourself? Please leave a comment below, even if it’s just to say hello xx

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It's late on a January afternoon. Once again, my aims to have an early morning walk to smile at the pale crescent moon, has turned instead to kissing the golden hour before the light disappears. I’m trying to catch a glimpse of the sun, the SPF 50 I lathered on my face this morning pointless now, as the sun is almost at the horizon. But it feels good to be out. I've had this wired, thrumming feeling in my body, this very strange energy that’s uncomfortable to sit with.

It's late afternoon because life took hold and steered me in other directions, threw me other distractions today. But I’m here, and so are the good things that nurture my soul. The bird songs are melodic, seeping through my pores. The blue sky above me is dissected by gnarly, sprawling, bare branches. I am calmed. Soothed, and I am filled with hope, as is always the way of these walks.

Our connection with nature is something not fully understood yet.  It’s categorically undeniable that people in cities are more stressed out, and those closer to nature are much calmer. These walks are my daily medicine. They help me to recalibrate, to sort out problems whilst my body is busy moving. It’s where I often write. It’s become a bit of a ritual and I usually feel unsettled if I miss it.

Back in my early twenties I was prescribed anti-depressants when I could no longer function at uni, due to losing my family home unexpectedly and dealing with the repercussions of that. I lasted only a few months on them. I hated the way the way they made me feel. Oddly numb, like nothing was really touching me. I looked to taking it easy after I graduated to try and help, and I lost myself in the joy of reading picture books for both enjoyment, and research (back then I wanted to be a picture book writer and illustrator).

It helped. The shadows abated enough to create my own artwork. I started going for walks in the local green, too. Nature was giving me something that no drug could mimic. My depression is circumstantial: it took a while for me to be sure, but it’s never reared it’s head for me without something going on in my life (trauma, financial strain, grief etc). That may change, at any point, but it’s how I’ve come to understand it this far. And when there’s stressful things going on, my best option is to find downtime, ideally outdoors.

The minute I step outside my door and get outside, a shift happens. Adventure and freedom await. I’m privileged: this isn't me commuting, this is not a walk that has a destination at the end of it. It’s me going out for the joy of it.  Not too long ago, humans often went outside for this unattached walking, a ramble, if you will.  There was no goal – other than perhaps seeing a rare bird species, or a new cloud formation. It was about listening to the land, communing with the wildlife.

The pace of life has picked up so fast and we’re collectively feeling it. We’re exhausted by technology, and how ingrained it's become in our livelihoods. I know there’s an irony here; a writer talking about needing headspace and getting on a walk, and yet I am talking into an app on my phone to record information to put up on a website. I’m doing this because this is the way the world is. This is how we connect with people. For me, it's all about connection. And actually, it probably would be better for my mental health if this was not the medium I used.

But, I’m not complaining. I know that I can connect with readers farther afield than I would otherwise be able to, and I cannot tell you how much that excites me, to be able to have conversations with people living elsewhere on the planet. It gives us a much bigger perspective… a more altruistic one.  But there is a balance to strike. I know there are many people out there who are buckling under the pressure to be constantly churning out content and ideas, getting comments and likes. It’s why I was firm about the fact that this space doesn't have any boundaries or limitations. It's going to be coming to you from my walks, where I have time and space to think and share my truth and my honesty, and that's pretty much it. It's free to evolve as I might. And it's very much a deliberate, willful act of self-determination and actualization, hence the name, re-wilding.

Earlier this morning, I was far away from nature, getting my lumbar spine X-rayed. I've had chronic, acute pain in my mid-low spine for the last few months, and they want to make sure it’s nothing serious. A few months is far too long to be in pain, but I was convinced we needed to get a new bed, even though ours was only five years old. When we went away for a night, my back would ease a bit. So we got one but the pain’s still there, weeks later.

I’m lying on my back on this solid, medical bed, getting my X-ray taken, and the technician comes over and places her hands on me to re-position me. She is so gentle, pressing around my ribs and, and around the curve of my hip socket, so careful. A surge of emotion wells up, deep in my core, and I pause, asking myself to identify what this is. It dawns, that perhaps I’m feeling a bit of a lack of care, or of nurturing at the moment.

A lot of people will probably relate to that feeling. When you think about it, what are the spaces in our lives that actively nurture us and make us feel held? The kind of held where there’s creative nurturing, inspiration. There's talking with other writers, there's reading books, connecting online. I think I miss being around other writers. Covid safety has been paramount for me as I have chronic illness, but it’s meant I’m missing out on interaction. And I’m feeling it.

At the start of 2018 I started running a co-work for writers that ran for eighteen months, where I was meeting with a group of other writers weekly. If anyone encountered a problem in their writing, they’d just brainstorm or troubleshoot it with the group, and it was a very supportive environment. It’s where I penned my first novel and took myself seriously as a writer for the first time. Just a few months later, the pandemic hit.

I’m aware that although I’m autistic, and I like my space, I also love and thrive on connection, on the meeting of kindred spirits. I need a nurturing space, as a creative person. I get inspired and energised knowing I’m with people also trying this thing we call writing. I think anyone who is a habitual nurturer responds positively to that being returned. As a carer and activist, I don’t always prioritise my own wellbeing and work, and sometimes it takes a moment as simple as a strangers kind hands wrapped around my bones, to realise that.

It’s been a traumatic couple of years, not least because of the pandemic. I lost my mother-in-law, had a targeted attack against me online, which resulted in a drawn-out police investigation, and I experienced a situation where a mentor let me down immeasurably, the trauma from which I am barely beginning to process. These are big events to be dealing with, and in my case, whilst dedicating myself to creating a free resource for the publishing industry which teaches them how to be accessible to disabled communities. It has been a time where I’ve spent far more hours at my desk than I intended, and far too little outside.

So I am here, at a moment, an in-between. Getting the Inklusion guide printed in a couple of weeks, managing final steps with my co-founder (who is also burnt out), whilst trying to grab the threads of my creative self once more. What does that look like? In an industry that typically undervalues writers, and which holds up barrier after barrier to development. The shape is there, it’s still nebulous. There are things happening. Good things. Kindness, and support, and belief. There is progress. But it’s slow going.

The young assistant technician comes over, and the lead technician draws a curve around my hip, telling her to angle it just-so for this kind of X-ray. Both of them have their hands on me and I feel like I’m being blessed, or something. It’s spiritual – at least it is to me. I’m as aware of their cells, bones and muscle as I am of my on in this moment. We’re a triptych.

I wonder if they can heal by touch.

When I had a breakdown due to burnout a few years ago, a friend who did massage got me into her clinic every week, for an hour’s full body massage, with occasional reiki. This went on for a couple of months. Every time a session was over and the door closed behind my friend, I’d howl salty, emotional agony into my towel, tears releasing more than my conscious could. My body was ejecting what no longer served me, in the best way it could. It was processing hard things. Gradually, the tears became less, and my body stopped hurting so much. I think it was a mix of feeling held, supported, nurtured – and of energy being moved through me in a way I couldn’t facilitate myself.

This time, I’ve been working hard on a cerebral level, addressing what challenges me, what saps my energy, and what I can loosen myself from to better align myself. But I’m on the fringes of that place, where care is the best option. I don’t know where to find it.

The technicians lift their hands and go behind the screen. They photograph my bones. But I'm so much more than that. The lightness of their touch tells me they know this, too.

I believe we need to create spaces that nurture writers, care for them and address their needs. These places exist, and they do a wonderful job, but we need more of them, and we need them for people who carry additional burden. Imagine a place where you are welcomed, free of cost, to sit with yourself, with others, and your ideas. A place to rest, or to write, where you are nurtured. Perhaps there’s yoga, counselling, sharing circles. Everything is optional, nothing is a commitment.

Writers have the power to influence society, to change the world. People pick up a book when they have a problem they don’t know how to solve. I read books endlessly that teach me so much about myself, where I want to be, or how to improve on multiple levels. How to dream. We are often empathetic people who are serving a greater purpose with our work. Whether it's to shed light on inequality, climate catastrophe, or whether it's to encourage people to achieve their intention, or to highlight the ways in which we’re all different. Books are our salvation, for many occasions, and we need to nurture their creators.

If you’re an activist, a carer, or someone who is in a position of serving society in some way, it’s an admirable thing to be doing, but you must be kind to yourself. Take a step back and take an action that serves your wellbeing. It’s okay to take time out to re-calibrate, to be firing on one cylinder instead of all of them.

I don’t know what’s ahead, but I know I’m choosing me, as much as I can for a while. I’m giving myself a hug.

You should give yourself one, too.

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If this resonates, I’d love to know. We don’t talk about this like we should. Leave a comment below and I’ll respond xx

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