Healing the Whole ...

I'm an English Literature graduate. I'm soon to be a published author. I am a woman who loves words. But I have been on a journey of re-education recently. It begun probably a year ago when I came to the realisation that it was not the words but the intention that really mattered. And over the past couple of months I have really seen that realisation play out in practice. I am lying in bed as I write this looking at the face of my sleeping daughter. I cannot put into words what the image before me does to my heart. I could take a photograph but it will not capture everything contained in this moment. The sound of her breathing, the smell of her hair, the warmth of her skin. And this moment is made all the more special by its location in time. We are on holiday. It is the fifth day and the first I have awoken not in excruciating pain. As we settled down to sleep last night I held my little girl as she cried. She cried for her animals that have died. For the brothers and sist...

I have had sadness inside me for as long as I can remember. I was a sad child, a sad teenager, and I am a sad adult. Is the sadness depression? I don't know, although I have been offered anti-depressants. Is it genetic? I don't know, although three members of my family have talked about or attempted suicide. The thing is I learnt quite young that sadness didn't get me anywhere and it didn't make people want to love me. So I learnt to hide it. I think I was about six years old when I can remember sobbing into my teddy before wiping my eyes and feeling I had to pretend not to be sad in front of everyone else. I thought finding a man who would love me forever was the cure to sadness. But following my marriage when the sadness returned, I realised it wasn't. So I tried counselling. And that wasn't the fix I hoped for either. It turned out the sadness was part of me and so we had to learn to live together. Counselling helped me talk about the sadness. It helped...