Monthly Archive: June 2020

In 2017 I had a series of eye operations.  On the first day a nurse came to talk me.  She wanted to take my blood pressure, temperature etc, and go through a few medical and personal details.  She turned to her notes and asked me about my previous medical history.  I told her that on the whole I was a very healthy active person with no real health issues apart from at that point, my sight. She gave me a rather sharp look and said she’d like to talk to me about my anxiety and depression.  I must have looked pretty shocked and I asked her what anxiety and depression.  She shifted uncomfortably in her chair and told me anxiety and depression...

I used to pass my days at home in silence.  I like to work in silence and I find background noise distracting, but it also means that I can spend over 8 hours a day in complete silence, which sometimes seems to make me just too thoughtful, too introspective.  So some months ago I tried having Radio 2 on in the background, just for a couple of hours to break the silence and give me some contact with the world outside of my head and my computer. One day I was listening to the radio and a song came on that make me literally shake and made tears run silently down my face.  That song was “Eternal Flame” by The Bangles.  Not...

Of the people I follow and of those who follow me (on Twitter and via this blog) and of the people I support away from social media, some are much nearer to the start of their journey, some are still loving and fighting for their children and some are further on in their journey than me. At the beginning I found these almost endless variations of these journeys hard to process, but now I’m further down the road I am starting to recognise the signposts.  Things that people told me a year ago which made no sense then, now make so much sense as I too reach that place.  I remember things that people said and now, it comforts me.  I have...

When I was 8 months old my Social Services file was altered to include the words “No Negro blood, no Jewish blood – suitable for adoption” and with these words my life was changed.  As a consequence of this new page in the file I was adopted by a white middle-class family. I identify as white with mixed heritage. I have fair hair, fair skin and blue eyes.  I’m 20% white European and the rest of me is Sephardi Jewish, Gujarati and Gambian.  I can trace my family back for 39 generations, which is a lot of history and some of that history is not very nice.  Between the Spanish Inquisition, the East India trading company and the Royal Africa Company, there’s...

It was never a plan. I never meant to stay away so long. There was never a point where I sat down and decided “I won’t write anything more”. It just happened. It happened because the act of writing became too hard. Remembering to breathe had become rather difficult and those moments in between taking breaths had also become something I needed to think about, to concentrate on, in order to make it from one breath to another, from one moment to the next. Just existing took all my energy. Then there was the sorrow. Some days it washed over me and rolled over me like surf, sucking me under until I couldn’t see daylight. Some days it felt more difficult to...