You know when you've got a bill to pay, or a form to complete or a dentist appointment to make, and you put it off? You put it to one side. "I'll do that tomorrow/next week," you tell yourself. But you never do. We kind of do that with our lives, don't we? We wait. For the right moment. For The Motivation to arrive like a green light: GO. For the children to get a little bit older. For the mortgage to be paid off. For the weather to change. We kid ourselves. "When I've lost the weight, I'll start [...]

I've been in Germany exactly a week today. It's been uplifting, and exciting, and heartening, and I-can't-believe-we're-actually-here-and-we're-doing-this-ing. It's also been fucking terrifying and hard. I don't speak German. Well, I can get by, but I'm far from fluent. It's isolating. To not fully understand conversations, to feel really small and pathetic when I'm standing in a supermarket reading the ingredients on the back of a packet, trying to figure out whether it's vegan or not. Simple stuff, you know? But stuff that can feel heavy and frustrating and way out of my depth. It's a familiar feeling, being way out of my depth. I always jump in [...]

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” ~Mary Oliver On the January 17, 2000, I was in a car crash. I was living in France at the time. I don’t remember much about the crash. I know that we all walked out of the car relatively unscathed. Shocked, scared, and confused, yes. Injured, no. I remember thinking that I should probably call my mum and dad back in England. Tell them what happened. What I didn’t know in that moment was that back in [...]

My Mum and Dad looked at each other in that way parents do and smiled, bemused.  I was 6, maybe 7. We were sitting around the dinner table. I was asking them questions. "So, what would your perfect house look like?" My Dad: "Well, we'd have a house in the country away from the rough and tumble of everyday life, somewhere with a stream. We would have bikes and stuff hanging around. No television, no locks on the door, people would come and go without having to knock. Neighbours always in and out..." "Well." I said "You have a house. [...]

I walked through the door of the room. "Fuck", I thought. "What the hell am I doing here?" I was in my local community centre. White walls and pinboards and posters and cheap, plastic chairs. I realised pretty quickly that I wasn't at all dressed for the occasion: Black skinny jeans, Guns 'n' Roses t-shirt (the same one, in fact, that I am wearing in the photo above) and biker boots with a silver buckle on the back. Twenty-five women stared back at me. Not a single one of them was under the age of 65. Purple rinses and pearls [...]

Last night, as I climbed into bed, I set my alarm for 5am so that I could get an early morning swim in before a full day ahead. Do you know what happened at 5am this morning when my alarm rang? I turned it off. "Fuck that" I thought. And rolled over. There was no way I was getting out of bed, in the dark and cold, for a swim. No way. 5 minutes passed. I couldn't get back to sleep. How annoying. 10 more minutes passed. I still didn't get up. You know when your friend texts you, an [...]

You know what? It's ok to not know what. To not have the answers. To have a messy life, a messy mind, messy hair. It's ok to not like a certain person, to not have to analyse why you don't, you just don't. It's ok to one day feel like you're on top of the fucking world, and the next day for everything to feel a bit grey and weird. It's ok to be weird, to not feel like you totally fit in. I repeat, it's ok to not fit in. It's ok to not WANT to fit in. Relish [...]