A COMPLICATED PLACE –

Feb. 4, 2021 – I’m 34 but this feeling isn’t unfamiliar; this spiralling soothed by the strange comfort of a sterile white room. I felt the same thing when I was just 17, enduring another – albeit entirely different – physical crumpling. Awful, in many ways. But, my God, the enforced pause. That was welcome. Even more so now. Recently I’ve thought of poisonous mushrooms and oncoming traffic. The kind that just clips you but puts you down enough to enjoy an achingly slow passage of time, statements not questions, white rooms and malt biscuits.

This need to rest had started a few years ago, not long after I’d had my second child – the younger of my two beautiful buttery-haired boys. Becoming a mother had brought me home. I was burning with love for them.

Yet I was also aware of that scratching white noise of anxiety, which won’t lay dormant in your thirties. An old-school interference still cracking away and a manic preoccupation with ‘do more, be more, try harder, be better’.

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