Out walking our sweet dog Parker, on one of our well trodden routes recently, I glanced up and noticed the leaves that had been radiant green only a few weeks before. Now, the very first hint of autumn’s kiss had begun to gather at their edges.

It was very subtle, a burnish of gold here and there, but still, a quiet reminder of how fast the last twelve months have gone.

For once, I didn’t rush past.

I paused and found something pulling my attention. In a moment of wild abandon, as if I’d stepped out of a period drama, I settled myself at the foot of the tree. Something I always feel the urge to do, but never actually do.

It was there, with my bottom resting on the roots of an old oak and my back pressed against the rough bark, that I realised I’d been living through a year of autumn.

Not according to any calendar, of course. The world outside had obediently moved through all four seasons. And definitely not the pumpkin spice filled, walking through piles of crisp leaves kind.

A different kind of autumn.

One that arrived without fanfare, settled in and then stayed long after November ended.

This autumn has been inside me.

I’ve always suffered with my throat when I’m not taking care of myself properly, and the beginning of this year brought infection after infection. My usual remedies of herbs, honey and tinctures offered very little relief, and I reluctantly went to my GP three times in as many months.

My body, it seemed, knew what season I was in long before my mind found the language for it.

I was being asked, demanded even, to slow right down. To let things fall away. To stop pretending I needed to always be in a season of perpetual bloom.

For much of this time, I felt myself drawing my sap inward. Just like the trees that had stopped me in my tracks. Consciously pulling my life force back from the outermost branches and slowly, but surely, returning it to my roots.

I’m beginning to understand that our own seasons and cycles don’t always correspond with the ones unfolding out in the world.

Sometimes we are given years of summer. Long stretches of productivity and warmth. Saying yes to going out and then staying out late. Planning. Being visible. Many months when life seems to flow on a forward trajectory.

And sometimes winter comes early and stays late. Hunkering down against a barren internal landscape, surviving more than thriving. We rest out of necessity rather than desire, keeping small fires and conserving what little energy we have left.

A season when simply making it through the day is enough.

But it’s not been winter for me. It has felt like autumn. A long, slow withdrawal.

There has been shedding.

God, there has been shedding.

I’ve lost more than just leaves this year.

There were endings I didn’t choose. Some things fell suddenly. Others had, if I’m honest, been loosening for years.

Relationships that I never would have dreamt would fall away.

Gone.

Old versions of me I’d insisted on wearing like an old baggy jumper that no longer fit. Pulling it on out of habit.

Certainties, evaporated.

Ideas about who I thought I had to be, slipping away like sand.

And things I once believed I had to grip and control, because losing them might mean losing a part of me too, disintegrating like paper thin leaves.

But most significantly, I’ve gradually shed the belief that I need to constantly produce in order to be worthy of my place here.

Autumn’s wisdom is slowly teaching me otherwise.

There has also been a definite slowing. A return to all things cosy.

The herbal teas I love to blend and brew. A mountain of half finished books, carefully piled by my bed. Journal pages filled with musings, reflections and stories. Soft blankets. Early nights.

Discovering a love of learning.

Listening.

Long, unhurried conversations.

Time spent trying to understand myself rather than searching for flaws to fix or improve.

Less reaching for the next thing immediately.

More rooting into what has already grown.

Sitting beneath the oak tree, I began to wonder if this tree had ever apologised for letting go.

Whether it mourned each leaf that fell from its branches, fearing it may never grow another. Or maybe it simply trusts the wisdom moving through it.

Perhaps autumn is not a failure of summer after all.

Perhaps it’s proof that we instinctively know exactly what to release, and when.

This year I’ve not bloomed.

It has been my year of loosening, gathering, composting, remembering.

Drawing my life force back from the scattered corners, down into the dark, unseen places where life waits.

And maybe that’s its own kind of growth.

This morning I jumped out of bed to weigh myself. The familiar buzz of excitement gathering in my belly, wondering if the numbers had ticked down. A tiny pull of anxiety in case, despite me being “good” all week, despite my sweaty gym sessions, the number had remained the same or, worse, travelled back in the other direction.

I wasn’t going to share the exact figures, but I’m starting to feel safe here on Substack. I feel this corner of the internet is a place I can just write without feeling the weight (excuse the pun!) of judgement.

A few months ago, I stepped onto the scales. They had been gathering dust, tucked discreetly out of sight, behind bottles and jars in the bathroom. I’ll admit, I had been deliberately avoiding them for a long while, knowing the numbers were not going to be in my favour. But curiosity piqued, so I wiped them down and dutifully stepped aboard.

12 stone 6lb.

My heart sank.

A barrage of nasty self talk flooded my brain.

Lazy. Fat. Stupid. Unlovable. Unattractive. Greedy. Disgusting.

I remember thinking, in that moment, how desperately I wanted to lose weight. And so I began restricting what I ate. I am a foodie through and through. It was hard. I was surprised by how quickly I returned to labelling food and my behaviour around it as “good” or “bad”. If I ate before 12pm, that was “bad”. If I managed to skip breakfast completely, this was “good”. Demonising feelings of hunger. Putting food I loved into columns of acceptability.

After a while, I did become more conscious of what I was eating. I developed an awareness of my habits. Was I actually hungry or just feeling snacky? Or bored? Or needing to feel something?

I had a target number in my head and I imagined that if I ever got there, I would feel ecstatic. So proud of myself. Perhaps standing a little taller. Speaking to myself a little kinder. Looking in the mirror and giving myself a cheeky wink! As though I’d finally achieved something.

Today was that day.

10 stone 12lb.

I had made it to the tens, which a few months ago felt far out of reach. This was the number I’d wanted to see flash up.

And I felt nothing.

None of the things I thought I would.

Instead, almost immediately after I logged my weight, another thought arrived.

Keep going.

Fear bubbled up that I might not lose any more. That I might put some back on when we go on holiday next week. That this number wasn’t an arrival point at all, but something else I now needed to protect and grip hold of with all my might.

Confused, I lit some incense, pulled out my journal and began pouring it onto the pages.

And a much more uncomfortable question appeared.

What if the fear I’m feeling isn’t really about the weight?

What if I’m terrified of what people will think of me? What I will think of me?

If I allow my belly to become soft and round again. My boobs to become full and large. My chin no longer defined. If I take up more space.

Maybe that’s why reaching this goal hasn’t felt anything like I thought it would. Why I don’t feel like marking this achievement. Or sharing it anywhere, except in the safety of this corner of my world.

Because the goal was never entirely mine.

Being smaller, lighter, thinner has become a box I believe I need to remain inside in order to be accepted.

Loved.

Listened to.

Liked.

Sitting a little longer than usual with my journal and pen, I began to look backwards. And I could see how long I’ve been learning this. I could see this didn’t begin with weighing myself as a middle aged woman.

The preconditioning began much earlier.

I was always the child who felt different. I was painfully shy. Often angry for reasons I couldn’t articulate. I had terrible skin, acne peppered my face and I resorted to hiding some of it behind a thick fringe. My teeth overhung, even with my lips closed. My hair was described as “mousy brown”. I didn’t look like the version of myself that people who know me would recognise now.

And I loved food.

I was always hungry.

At some point my nickname became the Dustbin. I would finish whatever was left on anybody’s plate. I never asked for it, but the dinner ladies often gave me an extra helping at lunch.

Sometimes I wonder now whether they saw more than hunger in my eyes.

I changed schools so frequently that I never really had the opportunity to put down roots. I didn’t have a strong group of friends, let alone that one best friend who had known me forever.

I definitely knew what it was like to be on the outside.

Then, a few years after I had George, I began to change the way I looked.

I went back to college. I had just turned 24 and I was in a classroom with teenagers straight off the back of their GCSEs. 16 year olds.

I put myself under enormous pressure to achieve. To make it worthwhile leaving George, paying for this diploma and making something of myself after feeling like I had let everyone down by getting pregnant at 19.

I changed things.

I slimmed down. I had my hair highlighted. I had my teeth fixed with expensive veneers. I used sunbeds and my acne cleared up.

And something else changed too.

The way I was seen. The attention I received. The way people responded to me.

I had friends and finally, a social life. People wanted me to go out with them!

I was attractive in a way I had never experienced before. I was invited. Included. Wanted.

For a young woman with low self esteem, who had spent so much of her childhood feeling different, moving from school to school, never really belonging anywhere, this became intoxicating. It felt powerful.

And I don’t think I knew how to separate the two things. They became intrinsically linked.

My appearance had changed at almost exactly the same time that my experience of the world changed.

It was the early 2000s and I had rebranded myself as thin, tanned, blonde, with a bright white, straight smile.

I suddenly belonged.

I had found the secret key to unlocking the life I saw everyone else living.

So, somewhere along the way, I made an equation out of this.

This version of me equals this life.

If I stop looking this way, perhaps all of it will go poof. The new friends, gone.

The invitations to nights out, gone. The attention. The feeling of being wanted.

The girl who had spent her entire life feeling on the outside of things finally found herself on the inside, and right there and then she decided it was entirely because she changed how she looked.

And when something like this is reinforced often enough, it can stop feeling like something you’ve been conditioned to learn and starts to feel like the truth.

Maybe this box that I’ve been trying to stay inside ever since isn’t as simple as “I want to be thin.”

I think there is something much more vulnerable beginning to surface.

If I don’t look like x, y, z… will I still belong?

So that’s where I am today.

Not at the end of some great transformation, posing triumphantly for the after photo, but sitting with the uncomfortable realisation that the number on the scales was never going to give me anything other than another angle from which I don’t quite measure up. Another part of myself to tighten or scrutinise.

No number can protect me from rejection.

Or guarantee me love. Or belonging.

The goalposts can move forever. So maybe it’s time my goal shifts.

Not from one number to another, but from asking how I make my body acceptable to society, to asking what I actually want for my body.

And even deeper than that:

If nobody else could see my body, what would I want for it?

Because I didn’t just want to lose weight.

When I remove the imaginary audience, I can see that I don’t actually want very much from my body at all.

I want it to feel safe and loved.

I want to take care of it the way I would take care of a small child. Feed it food I know helps it grow strong and nourished. Move it so that it feels alive and gets to be amazed by all the wonderful things it can do. Treat it sometimes to the things it loves!

Mmmm…. CHEESE!

Make sure it has plenty of water, rest, sleep.

Fun!

Tell it how beautiful, unique and special it is every day.

That’s where during my writing today, tears came. I didn’t know why at first.

Perhaps it’s because somewhere underneath all the weekly weigh-ins, mirrors, scrutinising photos, clothes sizes and years of trying to change this body, there was something incredibly simple waiting to be heard.

I want my body to feel loved.

Not congratulated on another pound off.

Not tolerated until it shrinks.

Not punished when it doesn’t.

Loved.

I want to feel strong. Healthy. Capable.

I want to carry on the gym habit I’ve loved so much this last year. I want to stretch, dance, lift things!

Those things feel different. They feel like mine.

Movement doesn’t feel like punishment to me. I have loved exploring what different types of movement do for my body. The accomplishment of becoming stronger. Dancing until I stop thinking about what my body looks like because I’m too busy experiencing what it feels like to be inside it.

I don’t think I want to spend the rest of this life negotiating with numbers on scales, or in clothes, for permission to feel good in my own body.

Instead, I want to belong to myself.

To eat when I want to, without turning it into a moral failing. To move my body because it feels good, not because I’m trying to shape it into someone else’s idea of acceptable.

Isn’t it beautiful that when you approach your worries and fears with curiosity instead of judgement, they tend to shift and change shape?

Writing this, speaking my fears out into the universe, has softened my hold on the numbers slightly.

I wonder if I can let myself become a woman who doesn’t need another goal tied to her weight.

A woman who simply wants to feel strong, nourished, rested, capable and wildly alive.

A woman who doesn’t ask her body to be anything, especially acceptable.

But simply allows it to be.

Tomorrow the wheel will turn again. This time towards Lammas.

Usually, this is the point on the wheel of the year that gets me thinking about harvest. The first cutting of grain, golden in the fields and ready to be gathered in. Reflecting on the small seeds we planted months ago in the darkness, what has subtly emerged since, and what is now ready to be brought into the light.

This year, my harvest looks a little different.

Earlier in the week I had my annual health check. I’m a typical Virgo, and this is something I actually look forward to. A test I try to score highly in, and after being diligent with my health and wellbeing over the last 12 months, I went in confidently. Cholesterol lower. Tick! Weight lower. Tick! BP lower. Tick! I was, if I’m honest, smugly waiting for my gold star.

We came to the end of the assessment and the doctor pulled up my bowel cancer screening results. It had come back positive.

The room shifted slightly on its axis. It became fractionally smaller.

I found myself in that strange, suspended place. Where time slows down a little and you’re between knowing something and knowing nothing at all.

Now, thanks to the lovely doctor who saw my face pale and my eyes grow wide, and Dr Google, who I did promise not to check with, I completely understand that this result does not mean I have bowel cancer. My rational brain knows there are many other reasons a test can come back positive! I know that. I keep repeating it to myself like a mantra.

And still, when you hear the word positive the world goes very quiet.

There is still the what if?

My mind is exceptionally good at filling in the blank spaces where facts should be.

Waiting has now arrived like an unwelcome guest, changing the shape of the mundane. Uncertainty shuffles into the background of everything I do. Making dinner. Answering emails. Catching a train. Life carries on as it did before, but beneath everything, a part of me is constantly listening for news.

The initial shock is beginning to soften, and as I wait for appointments and investigations that I’m hoping will bring clarity, something else is ripening alongside the fear.

Gratitude.

I am realising how incredibly lucky I am.

Lucky that I have private medical care and that I booked the health check in the first place. I almost deleted the reminder email because I thought I was too busy to schedule it in. Lucky that things are moving so quickly, an appointment with a surgeon and a colonoscopy already arranged. No weeks of uncertainty stretching ahead of me.

And maybe most of all, I’m lucky to have people around me who care.

I wasn’t sure I was going to tell anyone. My initial instinct was to hold it all together. Don’t make a fuss! Don’t worry anyone unnecessarily. Wait until I know exactly what I’m dealing with before I even think about sharing the weight of it.

If I’m honest, there was another, less comfortable voice there too. Asking if I was being dramatic. Asking if I was looking for attention. Worrying about frightening people, only for it to turn out to be absolutely nothing.

I wanted to tuck this whole thing neatly away until I had definitive results to report.

But if the South Node in Virgo has taught me anything over the past 18 months, it’s that I can’t control my way into feeling safe.

Trust me, I’ve tried!

I have spent so much of my life holding things tightly, trying to anticipate what might happen next so I could get there first. Living with the lingering fear that if I loosened my grip even slightly, something would slip through my fingers.

So I always gripped tighter.

And somewhere along the line, I mistook control for safety.

I have been, however, slowly learning to trust that I don’t need to have the next 10 steps planned out in order to feel safe. I’m learning to give everything space to move, bend and soften.

I don’t have to analyse every possibility, prepare for any and all eventualities, or carry everything silently until I’ve fixed it, dealt with it and packaged the situation perfectly to present to everyone.

Surrendering to this looks a lot like admitting I don’t know.

It looks like saying I’m scared.

And it looks like allowing other people to support me and stand by my side in the messy uncertainty.

Perhaps that’s why sharing this made me feel stronger instead of weaker.

I told my husband. I told my sisterhood. I let the people I care about most know that there was something frightening I would be carrying through the next few weeks. I didn’t need them to fix this for me, but I wanted them to know I would quite like not to hold this alone.

To my surprise, almost immediately, something shifted. Nothing tangible had changed. I still didn’t have answers. But the weight of uncertainty wasn’t something I had to carry on my own.

There were messages of love. Jokes! Reassurance. Offers to accompany me to appointments. Help. Prayers. People sent healing and every scrap of lucky Jupiter energy they could find.

And I let them.

This is the part I want to remember.

I dropped my guard. I let myself soften during a time when my natural instinct was to toughen up and retreat inwards.

Tomorrow I won’t be hosting a Lammas gathering. There won’t be a circle or a big elaborate ritual to organise. Instead, my plan is to make a small fire with my family. Meditate. Pray. Write.

And while I wait for answers about what comes next, I am going to look at what I already have.

Because a harvest isn’t only about what has been produced. It is also a time to acknowledge what shifted around us while we were busy tending everything else.

I don’t have grain to cut, but I have plenty of other things to gather and be thankful for this Lammas. The strong foundations of my spirituality. A newfound, deep love for myself. An unwavering trust in something bigger than me, even when I don’t know what lies ahead.

A wonderful, crazy family I can lean on.

A sisterhood that teaches me what unconditional love and support look like.

The knowledge that vulnerability and strength can exist side by side.

This is my Lammas harvest.

Not definitive answers and absolute certainty.

But evidence that I have built a life that can support me while I wait.

As I sit with my family around the fire tomorrow, that is what I’m going to give thanks for.

And to anyone else marking the turning of the wheel alongside me, whatever your harvest looks like this year, I wish you a Blessed Lammas.

Later today, Mercury stations direct once again. The planet that governs communication, our mind, travel and technology entered Cancer on 1^st June for an extended transit and won’t change signs until 9^th August. Mercury is not entirely at ease in Cancer’s emotional waters, and astrologically, this creates friction. Communication becomes heavily coloured by emotion, and there can be a tension between wanting to be understood and the instinct to retreat into the safety of your shell rather than over-explain.

Pop culture likes to poke fun at Mercury retrograde, making it the ultimate scapegoat for everything that goes wrong including but not limited to, travel chaos, technology issues, even an ex making a comeback! But beneath the jokes and memes, there’s wisdom available in this regular cosmic dance, if you take the time look. As Mercury moves forward again, we’re invited to review, reflect and return to the parts of our lives we’ve been too busy to fully meet.

Early this morning, I sat with my trusty tarot cards and journal to begin unpicking the lessons this latest retrograde is asking me to notice. Which parts of my life are asking for a second pass?

I pulled the Ten of Pentacles and the Queen of Cups. Together, these cards brought up themes of legacy, long-term stability, emotional nourishment and self-care.

Ouch! Rest has always been complicated for me. Knowing when to stop and when to properly care for myself is something I keep circling back to. For years, my inner dialogue ran unchecked, telling me that rest was laziness. That if I wasn’t taking giant leaps forward, I was behind. That my worth and value were dependent on perfection, constant achievement and having all the answers.

Untangling my worth from what I achieve has taken time, and Mercury retrograde in Cancer has once again, reminded me that this isn’t something you deal with once, and walk away from.

2026 has brought so many opportunities for growth, creation and expansion, and my Virgo Sun has wanted to do all the things. I wanted to show up fully. I wanted to shine. I’ve poured myself into writing, breathwork, coaching, women’s circles, study, family and work. And there has been beauty in that. There has been so much joy in being devoted to the things and people that matter to me.

But sitting with my cards, one question floated to the surface: when did devotion become depletion?

I’ve been slowly chipping away at my coaching diploma for just over a year, putting in hours of practice with different clients, holding space for women’s circles and Wheel of the Year gatherings, and cultivating a community that has become a second family. And sometimes I forget that I am doing all of this alongside my full time job, a beautifully messy family who need a lot of my time, and a very patient husband who deserves my love and attention too.

I forget I’m one person. And like the lunar cycles I follow closely, I’m not meant to be full all the time. I need to wane. I need to rest. I need to come home to myself.

The cards seemed to whisper another important question: What example am I setting to those around me when I neglect my self care and rest?

True self care isn’t a luxury, or something to be squeezed in once everything else is done. It’s the daily, loving cultivation of my own inner peace, and nourishing myself emotionally. It’s learning to care for this vessel that holds my dreams, my relationships, my work and all my magic.

A lesson that became impossible to ignore this week. After a whirlwind of end of term responsibilities - leaving assemblies, discos, parents’ evenings, teachers’ presents, non school uniform days, trip money…..swiftly followed by a weekend away in London, a breathwork class, women’s circle prep, coaching and travelling into the city each day for work, my body finally said (or croaked..) no more!

I caught the worst cold I’ve had in years. There was nothing common it!

My throat was swollen and burning. My eyes were puffy. My head was banging. My whole body ached. It stopped me in my tracks. Perhaps the universe’s hand on my shoulder, gently but firmly saying, “We asked nicely. Now, stop.”

And I believe this is at the heart of Mercury retrograde’s wisdom for me.

It has shown me where I still fall back into old habits. Where I still measure my worth by how much I do or produce. Where a frightened, younger part of me still believes that if I stop, if I rest, if I’m not useful or impressive or constantly giving, then everything I have built over the last few years, might just vanish.

Maybe this retrograde has been reminding me that I don’t need to keep proving my worth or earning rest. So, as Mercury stations direct, I will take this wisdom with me: communication begins within. My body speaks. My emotions are messages from my soul. And taking some downtime is not a detour from the path, but part of the path itself.

I wonder, as Mercury begins to move forward again, whether this is an invitation for us all not to rush ahead too quickly. Perhaps we’re being asked to pause here a while and explore what the retrograde means for us, before we close the book on it.

What has your body been whispering, or perhaps shouting? What old stories have resurfaced? Is there a conversation that needs to be revisited?

Reflecting like this gives us the gift of awareness, and with awareness comes choice. What do we want to do with what we have noticed? Right now we sit in the gap, a sacred space, between what has been revealed and how we choose to respond.

Will we integrate the lesson, transforming awareness into action. Or will we continue to let the past dictate our future, and retreat into old habits?

Mercury may be moving forward again. But perhaps the real question is: how will you?

Before the school bell had even rung for the final time, she was already panicking about the summer holidays.

She arrived at our coaching session with a smile, but there was something underneath it.

Something in the spaces between her reassurances that she was good and things were fine. A tightness, a heaviness, the sense that the smile was perhaps the version of herself she thought she needed to present.

So I asked her: What’s sitting beneath the surface for you today?

And then her mask slipped away. 

Her daughter was breaking up from school that afternoon, and instead of feeling excited about six long weeks stretching ahead of them, she felt overwhelmed. Panicked, even. Because somewhere along the way, before the holidays had even begun, she had already decided she was going to get it wrong; that this summer was something else she would fail at, another quiet measure of whether she was doing motherhood properly.

At school, her daughter's class had been asked to draw pictures of all the things they were going to do during the summer holidays. Her daughter came home with a page filled with planes and theme parks and wonderful adventures.

Things they hadn't planned. Things they couldn’t afford. And suddenly, a child's drawing became irrefutable evidence: evidence that she wasn't doing enough, that everyone else was giving their children a magical summer while hers would somehow miss out, and that she was, in her own exhausted and frightened mind, a terrible mum.

I wondered how many other parents are carrying that invisible weight into the next six weeks; the pressure to fill every empty space on the calendar before a single day has even passed.

The mental arithmetic of working out admission prices, petrol, parking and food; whether you can afford to say yes, and the guilt that comes when you have to say no.The pressure to make memories, to make them magical, to make sure they don’t miss out and that, when September rolls around, they have something impressive to say when they are asked what they did.

As though a happy summer is a performance they are going to be graded on.

And then, of course, there was Instagram.

Because when you're already feeling inadequate, there is nothing quite like a little doom scrolling to provide you with an entire catalogue of people apparently winning at life better than you.

Beautiful sun-drenched holidays. Perfectly packed picnic baskets. Children in matching linen outfits running barefoot through lavender fields.  Days out. Festivals. Theme parks. Beach trips.

Summer bucket lists with 47 wholesome activities already ticked off before you've even remembered where you put last year’s sun cream.

We can spend hours looking at the unobtainable, the unachievable and, quite possibly, the completely unreal, and somehow use it as evidence against our own lives.

Exhibit A: no jet-set, all-inclusive holiday photos on your Instagram?

I find you guilty of giving your child an unhappy summer break from school.

We compare someone else's carefully selected square of summer with the full, messy, complicated reality of our own, and somehow begin to believe it isn't good enough. And our consumerist culture is very happy to keep us there.

Because there will always be another experience to buy. Another attraction you haven’t visited. Another holiday you can’t afford. Another carefully marketed way to make the perfect memories. Always slightly out of reach…and perhaps that’s the point.

Because if we ever start to believe that sitting in the garden, laughing together over an ice lolly, is enough, they would have far less to sell us.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, we have begun to believe that a good childhood is something we have to buy.

That free means we've failed, that staying home means we're not trying hard enough, and that if our children don't return to school in September with stories of planes and rollercoasters and expensive attractions, we haven't given them enough.

But enough according to whom?

As we talked, we gently explored what her daughter actually needed. Not the imaginary child she was comparing her to. Not the children on Instagram. Not the children whose summer plans had filled that classroom with pictures of grand adventures, many of which, I suspect, were born from children’s imaginations rather than confirmed bookings.

Her daughter.

A child with AuDHD who could easily become overwhelmed by full days, packed itineraries, unfamiliar places and relentless stimulation. A child for whom six weeks of constant excitement might not feel exciting at all, but exhausting, overwhelming and dysregulating.

And I think there might be something here for all of us. 

Sometimes we are overcome with a desperation to give our children the childhood we think they should have. We forget to look at the child we actually have.

What do they enjoy? What makes them feel safe? What does our family need? Not someone else's family. Ours.

So instead of looking ahead, we looked back: at previous summers, at the moments that had stayed long after summer’s heat had faded, and at the memories that had quietly become part of their family's story.

And they weren't the expensive ones.

They were gathered around a small fire in the garden, toasting marshmallows. Arts and crafts in PJs. Movie afternoons curled up together on the sofa with popcorn. Nature walks in the woods, getting dirty, building dens and making the kind of memories that we rarely see as important while we’re making them.

Small moments. Ordinary moments. Affordable moments. Moments of connection.

And I wonder how often we do this to ourselves.

How often we squeeze our families into someone else's shape of fun. We see another family spending the day at a theme park and decide our child not only wants that but must have it too. We see someone boarding a plane and suddenly our own garden feels restricted and insufficient.

We see elaborate activity schedules and start wondering whether an afternoon doing absolutely nothing is a wasted one.

But children aren't all the same,and neither are families. Finances are stretched at the best of times, let alone when you have children home for six weeks and need to entertain them, feed them and replace outgrown uniform and shoes ready for the next school term.

Nervous systems are different too, and fun isn't one universal shape that we all need to somehow fit ourselves inside.

Maybe your child's perfect summer is full of adventure. Maybe it's full of slow mornings. Maybe it's both. Maybe they want to climb trees, build dens, eat ice lollies in the garden and stay in their PJs until lunchtime. Maybe they want to go to the same park they've been to a hundred times, make something ridiculous out of cardboard boxes, or have days with absolutely nothing planned at all.

None of these things are lesser because they are free. None of them become more valuable because you paid £200 for them.

We seem to have confused the price of an experience with the value of a memory.

But when we think back to our own childhoods, it often isn't the biggest days we remember most vividly.

It's a smell. The sound of the door, knowing there is a friend and a whole day of bike riding waiting on the other side.

Staying up later than usual, running through a sprinkler in the back garden, eating dinner outside, the feeling of being allowed to make a mess, and the sound of someone we loved laughing.

The ordinary things that somehow became extraordinary because of how we felt while we were doing them.

So what if the question for the summer holidays isn't:

How do I fill these six weeks?

What if we allowed that to soften a little:

How do I want these six weeks to feel?

And maybe the answer isn't exciting. Maybe it's safe. Connected. Spacious. Playful. Restful. Free.

Because our children don't need us to become Butlins Redcoats or entertainment directors for six weeks, and they don't need every day to become a core memory.

They don't need a summer that is envy-inducing to someone scrolling through Instagram, and perhaps neither do we.

There will be boring days, too much screen time and, yes, definitely arguments. There will be days when everyone is fed up with everyone else and September feels approximately fourteen years away. There will be days when a carefully planned activity lasts roughly three minutes and someone announces they are hungry every hour.

That doesn't mean the summer has failed, and it doesn’t mean you have either.

It means you're a family spending six uninterrupted weeks together.

So if you're standing at the beginning of the summer holidays already wondering whether what you can give is enough, perhaps there is something you can put down before you begin.

The responsibility for making everything magical.  The guilt about what you can’t afford. The endless comparison. The invisible checklist.

The idea that happiness is measured by how much you can provide, organise, book or buy. Put down the summer bucket list if it has become another way to measure your success or failure at parenthood.

Close Instagram.

Forget the planes someone else's child drew. You don’t have to make memories according to someone else’s rules, someone else’s budget or someone else’s idea of fun.

You don’t have to give your children the summer you were sold. You only have to live the summer that belongs to you.

So perhaps the question becomes:What does fun look like for us?

Not for Instagram, not for the family down the road, and not for the version of parenthood we've somehow been sold.

For us.

Because a childhood does not have to be expensive to be rich. Love is not measured in admission tickets. Presence doesn’t require a booking slot.

And sometimes the summer they remember isn't the one where you took them the furthest, but the one where they felt closest to you.

Maybe that’s enough for this year. Maybe it always was.

Once upon a time, there lived a woman who longed for another child so fiercely that her wanting became a quiet ache she carried everywhere. For years, she tried to grow a baby in her belly, but only her sadness took root.

She did not yet know it, but somewhere beyond the rafters and roots, the old Fates had already taken up their distaffs. Between their unseen fingers, a red thread waited to be drawn.

In her 36^th year, the woman fell ill and travelled through the night to visit the trusted wise crone in the next village. The crone gave her herbs for the pain, but saw only one remedy for the woman’s condition. Not long after, she took from her the red thread that might one day have become another child. Whether the Fates cut it cleanly or merely passed it into other hands, no one living could say.

Afterwards, the woman’s grief settled deep within her bones, and she sank into a darkness that seemed impossible to escape. Spring blossoms wilted on the trees, and the pale light stretched into summer. As the days grew longer, so too did her longing.

By the end of the season, even the endless summer days had lost their lustre. In the forest, leaves that had once shone green began to burn in shades of orange and red. Autumn had arrived, and with it came a restlessness she could not name. Breath silvered the air on her morning walks into the village, and everything, once again, began returning to the earth, slowly turning inward.

In those lowest days, she paced her cottage, leafed idly through old books, and dusted corners that had long been neglected. She tried to restore some semblance of order to the home, though it had begun to feel as unloved and sorrowful as she did.

It was then, while searching among forgotten things, that she stumbled across her old grimoire. She had always practised witchcraft in secret, but over the years she had busied herself with other duties, allowing the book to gather dust, tucked discreetly away on the shelf. Now, holding the pages between her hands, she began to feel a familiar pull: a tiny spark of her power igniting in her belly. She placed the tattered book on the kitchen table, and a gust of wind from the open window slipped through the room like a knowing hand, turning the yellowing pages until they settled open at a spell she did not remember writing.

Cupiditas Absoluta — Absolute Desire. The pull she had felt on finding the grimoire intensified. The spark in her belly grew into a heat she could not deny. She read through the spell quickly, noting that the perfect time to cast it was Samhain, only three days away. Three nights, three preparations, three chances to turn away before the veil grew thin. Could she do it, knowing there was always a price to pay for magic as powerful as this? Could she dare to cast a spell that promised what she desired most in all the world?

A child.

She did not pause, not even for a second, to consider how such a gift might manifest. She pulled on her warm jumper and tattered old boots, took up her trug for collecting herbs and fruits, and left the cottage.

The wind was cool, and the earth smelt damp. She had already committed the spell’s ingredients to memory, and for the first time in months she felt she had a purpose. She would gather what was needed over three dusks, while the hedgerows watched and the crows counted her steps, and cast the spell on the night of Samhain, when the veil was at its thinnest.

Three days passed in a whirl of preparation and anticipation. On the first night she gathered. On the second, she ground and steeped. On the third, she would whisper the words until they felt less like a spell and more like breath. Her son, young and not yet hardened by the world, noticed the change in her, but asked nothing. Perhaps he feared the answer. Perhaps he hoped not to need one.

Samhain arrived, and all through the day the wind grew stronger, whipping up the fallen leaves and rattling the rafters of the old cottage like dry bones. The sky shifted slowly from slate grey to bruised purple as storm clouds rolled in from the west. At the garden gate, a crow watched without blinking. As the woman cleansed her space with dried sage from the garden, lightning split the sky, and the deep grumble of thunder drew ever closer.

That night, she cast the most powerful spell she had ever dared to weave. She begged the gods for a child, by whatever means they chose. Her desire burned through every fibre of her being and hummed in each cell of her body. Above her, or beneath her, or somewhere in the hidden seam between worlds, the Fates listened with their shears closed. In return, she vowed to honour them for the rest of her days.

At the height of the spell, the wind, which only moments before had shaken the little cottage, stopped entirely. Silence filled the room. Even the rain seemed to hold itself against the glass. The woman spoke the final words into the darkness, and as the promise left her lips, the single candle she had lit extinguished itself.

So mote it be.

Exhausted, the woman fell into bed and sank into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Morning came, and with it her son, standing at her bedside. His eyes were red-rimmed, and tears still streaked his soft cheeks. Fearing the worst, the woman scrambled from her slumber and demanded to know what had happened.

Outside, the rain fell almost as hard as the tears within the cottage. The young man poured out his story to his mother. A maiden from the village had fallen pregnant after they had spent just one night together. The woman listened, one hand closed around the edge of the blankets. Something bright and terrible stirred inside her, though she kept her face soft. She told him they would do what must be done and wait to see what fate had already set in motion.

Any spark of joy the woman felt that morning, soon gave way to uncertainty, as it became painfully clear that the young woman wanted nothing to do with either the baby’s father or his family.

The months passed slowly. At last, word came that a healthy baby boy had been born. The young father went to visit the new mother and his son, and an agreement was made: with his mother’s help, he would care for the child each week.

Those first months were filled with a hope and happiness they could never have imagined. The woman and her son settled into a gentle rhythm during the days they cared for the infant, who grew stronger each day. His tiny giggles were infectious, filling every dark corner of the home and driving out the pain and sorrow that, only months before, had lingered like a stain.

Together, they celebrated the turning of the seasons. They watched the baby smile, sleep, and slowly discover the world around him. The woman believed the fates had heard her at last. In their strange wisdom, they had placed one final child in her arms. And, as promised, she ventured often into the ancient woods, leaving three small offerings each time: milk, bread, and honey, or, when the moon was full, a little homemade wine. She spoke her gratitude aloud beneath the tall willow trees and often felt a silent reply: the call of a crow, a robin landing on a slender branch above her head, a fox darting just out of sight as she opened her eyes. The woods did not speak in words, but they had their ways of answering.

But love, when forced into shape, does not always hold. The young mother grew weary of the arrangement, and one day she vanished, taking the infant with her. No trace of either mother or child could be found. Only the crows remained, black against the branches, calling at dusk as if they knew which road had been taken.

The baby’s father was devastated, and his mother was consumed by a grief unlike any she had known before. It was a visceral pain, deep within her body, cracking her wide open.

Once more she turned to her craft. This time the spell she wove was stronger still. She poured into it three griefs: her son’s tears, her own fear, and the ache of the empty cot. She turned to the sky and let out a desperate plea, her heart unwilling to let him go. Somewhere unseen, the red thread tightened.

She demanded only one thing. Let love find and return him.

Again the spell moved swiftly. Before long, word travelled through official rooms and old stone halls, and the young mother and her baby were found. A narrow door opened between the child and his father once more. Whether law or luck had turned the key, no one could say.

But the spell had not yet reached its conclusion.

One evening, as the moon hung low and silver in the sky, the young mother reached out. Her life had unravelled beyond anything she could hold alone. She begged the woman and her son to take the baby for a short while, just until she was well enough. Outside, the wind moved through the trees as if carrying the words from one house to the other.

The woman said yes, of course, while silently thanking the universe for this sudden turn of fate.

Days, however, became weeks. Weeks became months. Months became seasons. One winter passed. Then another. Then a third. The short notes that had arrived in the early days, enquiring after the baby, came less and less, until they eventually stopped altogether. The weight of silence settled where a mother should have been.

The woman had been granted exactly what she had asked for. She remembered her heartbreaking plea: Return him.

The gods had placed one last child in her arms.

He became the light of her life. The greatest love she had ever known.

But sometimes, long after the young boy had fallen asleep, a soft blanket gently wrapped around his growing body, she wondered whether the gods ever granted wishes, or whether they simply answered them. In the quiet cottage, watching the rise and fall of his chest, she imagined an invisible red thread running from her heart to his and wondered whose thread had to be loosened, frayed, or cut for theirs to be tied.

Perhaps every spell asks to be paid.

And in those quiet moments, she could not help but wonder: had the price of her longing been taken from another woman’s life?

In the third winter, when the boy had grown old enough to dream his own dreams, the woman returned once more to the ancient woods.

Time had woven silver strands through her hair and softened the burning desire that had once lived inside her. The crows still gathered in the tall willow overhead, and emerald moss had reclaimed the places where she had once knelt to leave her offerings. The woods remembered her footsteps. The trees remembered her bargains.

She carried no desperate wish this time. No demand. No bargain.

She built no fire. Drew no circle. Spoke no command.

She laid down three things: sprigs of holly from her garden, a small amber-coloured stone, and a lock of her own silver hair. Then she placed one hand on her heart and the other on the earth, and whispered:

May the wounds that began with love end with love. May the child know he has always been loved. May his father lay down the weight he has carried. May his mother find her way home, wherever that may be. May I forgive myself for questions that have no answers.

She paused. The forest around her waited. The willow held its breath. The crows grew still. She felt the words before she spoke them. “For the good of all,” she whispered, “and harm to none.”

The wind stirred the bare branches above her head, not as warning this time, but as witness. Somewhere beyond the trees, where the sun dipped low in the winter sky, a fox barked into the growing darkness.

This time, no lightning split the sky. No thunder answered. No candle surrendered its flame. The woods did not take her words as payment. They received them as offering. Soft silence was the only voice that replied.

And somehow, this felt like the greatest blessing of all.

After the woman returned home from the woods, she peered into the little boy’s room, as she did each night, a ritual. He was asleep, snoring softly, one arm flung above his head.

She smiled.

For the first time in years, she was no longer gripping the spell she had cast. She realised that what she had spoken in the woods was something softer. Something older. A blessing, released with love into the universe. At last, she understood that holding tightly to something was no promise it would remain hers. For most of her life, she had believed that if she loved fiercely enough, wanted hard enough, and prayed desperately enough, she might persuade fate to loosen its grip.

Fate was never a fist to be opened.

It was a thread.

And all she could do was learn when to hold, when to mend, and when to let it pass through her hands.

She leant down quietly and placed a tender kiss on the boy’s forehead. Then, pulling the blanket around his slender shoulders, she whispered, “Sleep well, darling boy.”

Beyond the cottage window, the first stars appeared. Three bright points stitched into the velvet dark. The woman watched them shine and finally let the night have the rest.

And somewhere beyond those stars, three old women smiled over a length of crimson thread that had never truly been broken.

For Arlo.

Its 8am. I’m out of the door, gripping a travel mug of coffee in one hand, tapping at my phone with the other, buying a train ticket on the move. My backpack straps are pulled snug as I march towards the station, carrying a laptop, make up bag, half read book and the familiar weight of responsibility resting, not entirely metaphorically, on my shoulders.

Straight into the office juggling expenses, deadlines, meeting clashes and small talk about the weather (how very British!) By lunchtime I’ve answered more emails than I care to count, navigated back to back meetings and mentally catalogued the week’s logistics; teenagers, grown children, grandchildren, my husband’s night shifts, dog walks, and wondering if anyone will make a start on dinner that evening.

By 8pm, I’m barefoot in the garden, gathering sage for a sore throat tea, hoping for a glimpse of the moon, thanking the goddess that I made it through another day.

Apparently society still believes these versions of me shouldn’t coexist. To some people, these identities seem impossible to reconcile. And we’re still told we should pick only one.

Why do women still feel they have to compartmentalise their lives? We’re comfortable with the term mindfulness now. Therapy has become socially acceptable. Breathwork has been rebranded as performance optimisation. But mention a gathering for the full moon and people suddenly start searching for kindling and their pitchforks. I’ve learnt there are some things you only say once in an office. It’s not as if I was going to attend skyclad….

I’ve also learnt discretion. Women always have. We made our intuition more palatable, translating knowing into strategy. We learnt to soften our demands and lower our voice. We mastered the art of tact. Too direct, and we are dismissed. Too soft, and we are silenced. This is how we learned to speak.

Sometimes I wonder how much energy women spend on editing themselves. How much magic is lost in translation.

My spirituality and professionalism aren’t mutually exclusive! My inner anchor guides my ethical decision making. My personal beliefs don’t detract from my ability to meet complex demands in the workplace. Mindfulness feels acceptable because science can validate it. Breathwork because executives practice it. But mention goddess work, ritual, or cyclical living and things begin to get uncomfortable.

Is this the modern witch wound? Self-censorship for 2026.

I sit on the mindfulness team in the office. I run weekly Breathwork and meditation sessions on line for the handful of brave souls seeking a little refuge from the corporate chaos. I speak about stress reduction, resilience, nervous system regulation. I sometimes have to stop myself telling people they are souls having a human experience and are made of actual stardust.

I stick instead to translating what I do into legitimacy.

Something the corporate culture rarely acknowledges is that humans are seasonal. Cyclical. We’re not machines. My Earth based practices have taught me that there are times for growth, time for rest, times for retreat and a time for reflection. Paganism taught me that to understand endings, is to honour them. That Winter has value. Grief deserves witnessing.

That healing is rarely a straight line.

And for those of us carrying trauma this doesn’t just matter. It’s essential to our survival.

Trauma taught me vigilance. To anticipate needs before they are spoken. To perform competence. To stay useful. To over function.

The irony of spending my working life in a corporate admin role is not lost on me! A place where efficiency is not just a desirable attribute but something celebrated. The woman who always says yes.

How many women are being praised for resilience when they’re actually just surviving?

My pagan practice helped me ask different questions. How does this decision feel in my body? What needs tending here? Where can I loosen my grip on the outcome?

And these questions have also become anchors in my home life. Navigating a life that contains my soul mate, my children, grandchildren, friends, ambitions, grief and responsibility.

My practices, rituals, and herbs don’t promise a happy ever after. They offer co creation. Participation. Choice.

Permission.

Permission to honour our changing seasons, instead of forcing a perpetual Spring.

Permission to acknowledge the parts of us that are tired, grieving, uncertain or are still waiting to bloom.

Permission to recognise that healing is exactly that - a journey. A journey, not a final destination we eventually arrive at fixed and fully formed. it’s a conversation between the different parts of us. Who we were, who we are and who we’re becoming.

That is what my beliefs give me. Not the answers neatly collated into a spreadsheet. Not cast iron certainty.

But the permission to be both.

Professional and spiritual. Intelligent and intuitive. Capable and soft. Logical and deeply feeling.

A woman who can navigate expense reports, book multi stop client roadshows and prepare budgets by day, then gather her herbs from her garden, whispering gratitude to Mother Earth by moonlight.

We became fluent in self editing. We softened our edges, translated ourselves into something easier to understand and hid the parts of us that want to run wild and feral, deemed too emotional or too much.

Perhaps we adapted because we needed to. Perhaps we still need to. But I wonder how much energy we spend maintaining versions of ourselves airbrushed into acceptability. The brilliant versions. The wise versions. The untamed versions.

My hope is that one day women won’t have to consciously choose which parts of them are safe to bring to the workplace, the school gates, the communities they call home. Or to any space where belonging still feels conditional.

Until then some of us will continue to carry laptops and lunar journals in the same bag. We’ll keep crystals tucked discretely into bras, stir sigils into our coffee before a difficult meeting, gather sage from the garden for sore throat tea and thank the goddess for getting us through another busy Tuesday.

Quietly. Gently. Sometimes unapologetically.

Reclaiming permission to be both.

Nobody talks about the grief of growth. Not really. They talk about healing. They talk about alignment. About becoming. They talk about stepping into your power, raising your vibration, finding your people and living your truth!

They share after photos. Faces turned up to the sun. Lithe bodies dancing in woodland, carefree and wild. They show the breakthroughs. Not the breakdowns. They show the clarity. Not the WTF just happened, that comes before it.

They forget to mention that sometimes growth feels an awful lot like loss. Like heartbreak. And heartbreak hurts. It really fucking hurts. This week a friendship spanning half my life shifted. Two women I thought of as sisters.

But before I talk about the heartbreak. I need to tell you about the love.

These friendships weren’t casual friendships. Not your meet for coffee once in a while people. These two were my ride or dies. These women became family.

For close to two decades they stood with me through some of the biggest moments of my life. Birthdays, pregnancies, babies being born. They held me together when what should have been the happiest day of my life, was clouded by darkness. They pulled me off the floor when my son’s addiction took over. They celebrated every win as though it were their own and wiped my tears until I could smile again.

We laughed hard, ribs vibrating, gasping for air while desperately crossing our legs against the inevitable. We danced with aching feet in clubs and kitchens. Talked until the sun rose about everything and nothing. There were caravan holidays, Halloween parties and Christmas countdowns. We drank enough wine to sink a boat with very few regrets. For years our lives were entwined together like the roots of trees beneath a forest floor.

An unbreakable network under the surface, working together to lift each other into the light.

That’s why this hurts. Because you don’t grieve what meant little to you. You grieve what mattered.

I think part of this sadness comes from there not being a dramatic explosion. No screaming, no hurling accusations. No betrayal. No single event that blew this chosen family apart.

There was just life. A subtle shift. A small sidestep from me, I will admit. But not running away. Not abandoning anyone. Just a gentle turning towards myself, or more accurately a different version of me. One who drank less. First out of necessity, then because life grew. One who spent more time in nature.

One who found herself sitting in circles of women talking about the moon instead of sitting around tables talking over another bottle of wine.

Not better. Please don’t think that’s what I mean.

Just different.

And sometimes different is enough to change the shape of a relationship.

A few years ago I began gathering women in circles because I believed deeply in connection. In community. In women having spaces where they could be seen, heard and held exactly as they are.

I wanted to create the thing I had always longed for myself. Connection. Belonging. Sisterhood. The irony is that choosing this path ultimately lead me away from this particular friendship. Sometimes, even when the path is right for us it still costs us something.

What happened this week feels especially poignant as less than twenty four hours earlier, I stood on the edge of the water at sunrise celebrating the Summer Solstice. The longest day. The height of the sun’s power. And yet hidden within the Solstice is a truth we often forget.

Nothing lasts forever. Not even at its peak.

The wheel keeps turning. From the Summer Solstice the light begins its slow retreat. The seasons change. The tides change. We change. The people we love change too.

I feel that maybe, this heartbreak arrived exactly when it was meant to, as a reminder of something nature has been whispering to me for a while.

Loving something deeply does not guarantee we get to keep it exactly as it is.

There isn’t even a word for this is there? When a romantic relationship ends, it’s a breakup. When a marriage ends, it’s a divorce. There are no words for sitting in the rubble of a best friend breakup. No names for the people left standing in the wreckage.

No label, no title, no recognised period of mourning. Nothing.

It’s as though society hasn’t quite caught up with the fact that platonic soul mates can break your heart too. It feels incredibly lonely. There’s no language for what I am now. Not a widow. Not an ex. Not divorced.

Just a woman quietly grieving two people she thought would be there at the end of her story. I put them in the final chapter of my life without ever realising I was doing it. An assumption born from the present.

These women have been there for years. They know my stories, my secrets. They know my children. Seen me at my best and my worst. Of course they’ll be there when I get old. Of course they’ll be there for the next Christmas. And the one after that.

We never sit down and make a decision. Just an assumption that runs ahead without ever being checked. One that grows around us and settles into the foundations of our lives. Maybe that’s why friendship heartbreak feels like a brutal gut punch. The grief isn’t only for the person they are now. It’s for the future versions of them you’ve carried without knowing.

When we love people, we don’t just love them in the present moment. The love has already travelled to future birthdays. Future woodland walks. Future posh pizza lunches. With future us! And that’s what hurts. Not just losing them in the present. But losing what you thought would be.

Still family. Still showing up for each other. Not just fading away from the pages of our story halfway through.

Right now I’m at the stage where everything that once made sense has dissolved into something unrecognisable. Like the mush inside the butterfly cocoon. There’s neither a caterpillar nor butterfly here now. You can’t see the wings. Just the loss of what was. Spirituality rarely speaks of this cocoon stage. We are sold the butterfly! The transformation. The rebirth. The rising.

At the moment i’m in the cramped, dark place. A gentle pressure against my body. The place where your heart breaks open. The part where there is a physical ache. Hot tears fall frequently and I don’t attempt to stop them. I let them sting. I like the sting.

Today I don’t know what comes next. I don't know whether this friendship could evolve into something new once the dust has settled. Or perhaps it’s reached a natural end. I don’t know if this is a friendship paused. TBC. Or a goodbye.

And today, if i’m brutally honest. I’m too tired and too sad to know. I’m going to lay down the burden of trying to figure out what comes next. I’m done walking in circles looking for certainty where there isn’t any. Instead I will walk a path on my own. With the ache that feels like my stomach has fallen out.

Today I want to feel it. Not fix it. Not heal it. Not bloody reframe it! And I don’t want to sprinkle glitter and rainbows over it and pretend it’s better.

Just feel it.

Because the pain is proof there was something there. Something amazing. It’s proof my heart was wide enough open to let people in. And despite how much it hurts, I refuse to close it again. I won’t be guarded. I refuse to convince myself that caring less is the answer. Instead I will let my heart change shape around the loss, however it needs to.

As i’m writing this (yes i’m still going!), I find myself thinking of my grandson. When his legs have ached after a growth spurt, I grab him for a huge cuddle and tell him the same thing each time. It’s just growing pains my gorgeous boy. All part of growing up.

Perhaps nobody ever stops growing up. At forty seven, my soul is still stretching into shapes it’s not known before. Maybe some of the deepest growing pains come long after childhood.

The ache is proof that i’m still growing too. And maybe that’s what this is.

Growing pains.

I once knew a women who was lost.

From the outside looking in, she had it all. A wonderful husband, two gorgeous boys. A good job in London. Friends. Money. A packed diary. A life that looked, by all accounts, perfect.

But, what people didn’t know was that she woke most mornings with a gnawing in her stomach and a wasps nest in her chest. A relentless buzzing that whispered she had left herself behind along the way.

So she stayed busy.

She filled each spare moment. If there wasn’t a dinner planned or a family gathering in the calendar, she arranged one. If there was an afternoon that appeared quiet, she hurriedly threw herself into a flurry of meaningless tasks. She poured a glass of wine, or three, most evenings, chasing the feeling of being alive or the relief of nothing at all. She could rarely tell which. Sometimes there were drugs too, offering a delicious escape for a few fleeting hours, before the wasps returned, more agitated than ever the following morning.

She couldn’t bear the stillness.

Because the stillness had a habit of allowing the truth to catch up. To seep in through the cracks.

Round and round she went, choosing distraction over honesty. Perpetual exhaustion over authenticity. Moving fast enough that her feelings never quite touched her, entirely unaware that the shadow she was outrunning was simply her own heart begging to be heard.

One day life stopped giving her places to hide.

The years that followed brought challenge after challenge. The kind that doesn’t break your spine, but rather cracks your chest wide open, forcing the air back into your lungs. Her son became desperately unwell. Addiction took hold. There were hospitals, impossible decisions, courtrooms, grief, fear and a tiny grandson who suddenly needed a safe place to land. And just when she thought she could vanish within the familiar noise of a busy life, the world shut down.

Covid arrived.

The once bursting diary lay limp in her hands. Its pages suddenly stripped of every hiding place she’d ever relied upon.

For the first time, she had nowhere left to go but inwards.

Looking back now, I don’t think the dread, the shame, the resentment or anxiety were signs that she was broken. I think they were desperate signals. Her body had become an alarm system, refusing to let her stray any further from herself than she already was. The buzzing, in hindsight, wasn’t the enemy. It was the part of her that still remembered who she was, calling her home.

Her awakening however, wasn’t a dramatic scene from a movie. There was no sudden epiphany, no soaring soundtrack, nobody swooping in to save her. No magical moment where everything suddenly made sense.

It began with a tiny seed. Or perhaps not a seed at all. Perhaps it was the moon.

During the months where the world felt like it was collapsing in on her, when everything unraveled faster than she could hold it all together, she noticed the moon.

Which sounds strange really. The moon had, of course, always been there. Not just in her life, but in the life of every human who had ever walked the earth. Ancient. Steady. And yet somehow, she was seeing her for the first time.

She began looking up. Pausing.

Following her through her gentle phases and endless cycles. Watching her disappear and return again. Finding comfort in the knowledge that even the moon didn’t shine her brightest all the time.

Perhaps that was the lesson she needed the most. That wholeness isn’t about shining brightly every single day. That rest wasn’t failure. That darkness was not something to fear, but to welcome and allow yourself to sink in to.

And once she began pausing with the moon, she slowly began hearing herself again.

Meditation came later. Reluctantly! Nature became a balm to her pain. Astrology helped her remember her curiosity. Herbs, breathwork, gardening, tarot, ritual. And women’s circles. Oh, the glorious, empowering, gathering of women. Sisters.

Now this was the homecoming.

Tiny lights appearing one by one. She tentatively stepped towards each flickering marker, trusting that there would be another, then another, to light her way. To guide her way along a path she hadn’t realised she had begun walking.

I don’t think any one of those things saved her. I think they simply helped her remember.

She is me.

Or perhaps I should say, she was me.

This weekend, we stand on the cusp of the Summer Solstice. The first day of Cancer season. I can’t think of a more fitting reminder. Cancer is the sign of home. Of roots. Of family. Of belonging. But perhaps its most potent lesson is that home isn’t always a place. Sometimes, home is the moment you stop searching outside of yourself and realise, you are not lost at all. You’ve just been wandering.

We often follow roads paved with expectation, fear, survival, people pleasing. Until one day, there’s a buzzing in our chest. A visceral ache we can’t name. Perhaps this is just the body’s way of telling us it’s homesick for a version of ourselves we’ve left behind. And no matter how many wrong turns we make, or how far we stray, if we pause for long enough, there will be always be a small light, waiting to guide us.

Back to our own hearts.

Back to our own truth.

Back home.

The trouble with absolute certainty is that it leaves very little room for any magic.

We’ve been taught that confidence is a 5 year plan. It’s having everything all worked out. An unwavering knowing. As if life is a straight road and it’s best to sprint to the final destination.

The Gemini New Moon arrives (on Sunday or Monday depending on your location) with a very different proposition. She asks us to gently step out of certainty. And into curiosity.

Gemini often gets reduced down to cliches. Two faced, chatterbox, social butterfly, indecisive. But what if we scratch beneath the surface?

What if Gemini doesn’t lack direction. What if instead, Gemini wants us to simply wonder? To peer down the rabbit hole. To ask… but what if?

Alice didn’t stumble into Wonderland with a map, compass and a strategy. She followed the white rabbit because she was curious enough to leave behind what was familiar. Brave enough to loosen her grip on knowing.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

Perhaps that’s the invitation this moon offers us. Not an exact heading. But instead a chance to become curious enough to explore your own life.

I’ve been thinking about how small my life would be if I’d only ever made decisions when I knew the outcome.

I wouldn’t have fallen in love.

I wouldn’t have had children.

I wouldn’t have started a business, changed direction, booked the trip, written the piece, or been brave enough to begin a women’s circle, talking about the moon to a room full of strangers, hoping they might become friends.

Most of the biggest turning points in our lives don’t happen through certainty. They happen because something in us whispers, what if? And only afterwards, looking back over our shoulder, does the path make sense.

I wonder if, as this new lunar month begins, we’re gently being guided, not to predict the future, but to become curious enough to participate in it. To loosen your grip on certainty, or needing to know the outcome just enough to ask a different question.

Not, “How do I know this will work?”

But…

“What becomes possible if I let myself find out?”

What if the career you think you’re meant to have isn’t the one that lights you up?

What if the belief you’ve carried for twenty years is ready to be questioned?

What if the version of you clinging to certainty is the very thing preventing change?

There’s a strange comfort in certainty, even when it keeps us stuck. We grip tightly to identities, routines and stories because they’re familiar. But certainty can become a cage just as easily as it can become a compass.

Curiosity, on the other hand, cracks the door open. It begins to allow in alternatives, movement, space, ideas, freedom! Pull the dangling thread and see what unravels.

So if you’re standing at a crossroads this Monday, resist the urge to have it all figured out. Perhaps the most powerful words you can utter are not “I know.”

But…

“I wonder.”

The rabbit hole isn’t a promise. It’s a possibility. And this Gemini New Moon whispers: go anyway. Follow the white rabbit. Wonder has a habit of finding those willing to wander.

And after all, nobody ever reached wonderland by staying exactly where they are.

Do you ever have those weeks… or if we’re being honest, months, where you feel like you’re not quite nailing the brief? Like everyone else got a neatly printed, laminated copy of the instructions while yours is dog chewed, coffee stained and a tiny bit on fire?

I keep imaging the game show host of my life announcing “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s take a look at the board to see what she should have done. Leaving empty handed, but what a great sport!”

Cue a tepid round of applause. And off I go.

I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a question I’ve not properly understood. That everyone else has read their exam paper twice, gathered their wits and are crafting considered manifestos, while I’m furiously beavering away on the wrong sheet entirely (in crayon!)

They say fake it until you make it, don’t they. Well that’s essentially my strategy right now.

Confident exterior. WTAF interior.

To add another layer of cosmic comedy, I pulled the Queen of Wands in my tarot spread for the week. She who swaggers into rooms like she owns it. Confident enough to carry off that white cloak and sunshine yellow gown. The creative, warm, magnetic, sunflower wielding queen (girl crush?). She doesn’t second guess herself over an email for three whole days, or spiral into a panic wondering if she used too many kisses at the end of a message (how many is too many? Asking for a friend!)

Meanwhile I’m over here questioning whether I know how to be a human person.

I look around at polished Instagram posts, classes full of women that look like they emerged lunging from the womb, wearing matching activewear. Even my teenage son, who can’t reliably locate the dishwasher, appears to be brimming with purpose and confidence about his future. It’s as though someone handed them the Compass of Life and they immediately knew their heading.

Launching into the week, sails billowing majestically.

I have a canoe. With one broken oar. And a tiny hole in the bottom, slowly letting in water.

I’d like to end this with some profound reframe. Something inspirational about trusting the process, blah, blah, blah. But that’s not where I am today.

It appears you just have to keep paddling with the broken oar, bailing out the water, waving confidently at the passing yachts carrying the immaculate, activewear clad women. Refusing to let self doubt convince you that you shouldn’t have even left the shore!

Maybe it’s about putting on the fabulous white cloak, picking up the sunflower and carrying on anyway. Even when you inner monologue quietly screams….. “Are we absolutely sure about this?”

I might be leaving empty handed on this week’s episode of Game of Life. But I’m going to give myself a little ripple of applause for taking part.

Click.

One? Or two?

Click.

Sat in the optician’s chair, she always asks the same question. And every time I answer with as much confidence as I can muster, sure (almost) I know which lens shows the world most clearly. Until the next click of course.

And then I realise I was wrong. Somewhere around lens seventeen, they all start looking identical and I trade my certainty for vague hope and a desire not to disappoint the optician!

I was thinking about this recently (yes, I need to book that eye test!) and reflecting on how much life is like being sat in that chair. Moving through the world looking through lenses we didn’t consciously choose.

A lens shaped by childhood.

A lens shaped by a broken heart.

A lens shaped by joy.

A lens shaped by being accepted. Or rejected. Or celebrated.

A lens shaped by kindness. Or cruelty.

Often the lenses become so familiar, we forget we’re wearing them. We mistake the lens for reality.

The child who grew up believing she was too much sees every situation through that prescription. The women who’s father got up and walked away overnight views relationships through a different one. The person who was embraced and celebrated for just being themselves, walks through life seeing something else entirely.

Same room. Same conversation. Same world.

Different lens. Different reality.

And that is perhaps why two people can live the exact same moment, seemingly the exact same experience, and walk away carrying entirely different stories about what happened.

Neither is right, neither is wrong. They were just looking through different glass.

Sometimes I think healing is less about changing the world and more about sitting in the optician’s chair of our own lives. Holding up an old belief. Turning the dial. And then asking ourselves…..what if this isn’t the clearest lens anymore?

Click.

Is this my story? Or one passed down to me?

Click.

Is this fact? Or fear?

Click.

Am I seeing what’s in front of me? Or what I’ve learned to expect?

And suddenly, almost imperceptibly, something shifts.

The world hasn’t changed. But the way we look at it has.

Does this lens still serve me? Or is it time for a new prescription?

One? Or two?

The smell of the wood. The rough edges that left splinters in your fingers if you weren’t careful. The excitement of climbing inside them before they were packed with everything we owned.

They would arrive without warning, like visiting guests nobody had invited. And once they appeared, you knew what came next.

We were moving again.

By the time I left school, I had attended 13 different schools. 9 of them were primary schools. Which is quite impressive when you consider there are only 7 years of primary education.

I was always the new girl.

Sometimes introduced at the beginning of term, standing awkwardly at the front of the classroom, pulling at her sleeves, while everyone turned to stare.

More often, I arrived halfway through. A disruption. An interruption. A child appearing from nowhere and expected to slot neatly into friendships, lessons and lives that had already been formed without her.

We didn’t have much money. Not Dickensian levels of poverty. Nobody was selling matches on street corners! But we lived hand to mouth. School shoes came from the charity shop.

I remember one particular pair.

Brown buckle shoes. Jesus Creepers, the other children called them.

Sometimes children would walk past my desk and pretend to drop a pencil. They’d crouch down for a closer look, then run back to their friends sniggering.

Children can be wonderfully kind.

And children can be absolutely brutal.

Looking back now, I can see that I learned something very important during those years.

Not how to fit in.

How to adapt.

If I couldn’t belong because of my clothes, then perhaps I could belong because I was funny.

If funny didn’t work, perhaps I could be clever.

If clever didn’t work, perhaps I could be helpful.

If helpful didn’t work, perhaps I could become whatever version of me seemed most useful to whoever was standing in front of me.

Without realising it, I became a student of people. I learned how to read a room. Honestly, by the age of 10 I could probably have been recruited by MI5! I could sense tension at 100m. I knew who was safe. Whose ego needed flattering. Who to avoid completely.

And the thing is, it worked. At least enough to get through school. Enough to survive being the new girl over and over again. Enough to make sure I wasn’t completely alone.

The problem is that survival skills like this rarely check whether they’re still needed. They simply keep doing the job they were hired to do, running unchecked in the background.

And so, 47 years later, I still catch myself scanning rooms.

Still adjusting. Still ready to change to fit in.

Still wondering which version of me would make everyone else most comfortable.

Somewhere deep inside, that little girl is still standing in front of a classroom full of strangers trying desperately to work out who she needs to be.

These days though, I’m beginning to notice her. With a little less judgment. With more of a gentle curiosity. Because she wasn’t weak. She was wise. She wasn’t damaged. She was adapting to circumstances no child should have had to navigate!

Of course she learned to people please.

Of course she learned to adapt her personality.

Of course she became skilled at earning her place in a room.

It wasn’t her fault. She knew no different. And perhaps this is what my healing looks like today. Not becoming someone new. Someone more. But gently taking the hand of the girl who learned to survive and telling her: You don’t have to audition for belonging anymore. You don’t have to earn your place. You don’t have to stay on high alert, guessing who everyone needs you to be.

The moving has stopped now.

The tea chests are gone.

And I’m finally coming home to myself.

I had plans.

The moon had other ideas.

Instead of pointing me towards my next great adventure, she tapped me on the shoulder and said “Can we have a quick chat about your beliefs?”

Not what I was expecting. I thought this blue moon was bringing me a treasure map. Instead she handed me a mirror.

Over the full moon itself and the days that followed, I found myself having conversation after conversation with the same theme running through them. A friend exploring why she felt she needed approval before going for a promotion she desperately wanted. A coaching client untangling years of people pleasing and the belief her value came only from doing more. A sister, noticing how she often altered herself so she was palatable to others. Not too much. Just right.

And then, because the universe enjoys a bit of irony, I noticed it in myself too.

Different stories. Different women. The same question. Life was quietly whispering “Can you see it yet?”

How much of our lives are shaped by beliefs that aren’t actually ours? The belief that says you’re being too much! Seek approval first! You must stay small to be safe! The kicker here is that none of this is new. The women I spoke with aren’t just discovering these beliefs for the first time. Most have explored shadow work. They’ve cried in circles. They’ve read the books (and have several of the T.shirts!). The surprise wasn’t finding the wound. It was discovering that it still had a bloody vote!

It appears this moon was never about shooting for the horizon, passport in hand, vision board pinned to the wall. She was here to shine her light on the stories standing between us and the next great adventure.

And that’s my Blue Moon hangover. Not the foggy feeling, not the overwhelm. Not even the emotional wobble discussed at length with my lunar loving ladies. But the lingering question. What do I believe now?

Not what anyone else believes. Not my husband. Not my family. Not what my younger self needed to believe in order to survive.

Me. Now. Today.

The penny is dropping (finally) that expansion doesn’t happen by chasing the horizon. It happens when we begin questioning the programs that have been left running unchecked in our minds. Deciding how much we’re allowed to grow. Perhaps that’s why this moon felt more like a contraction than an expansion. We’re being guided to check our beliefs before we take aim.

And if that’s the case, then maybe this is one hangover I don’t need to try and cure. Perhaps its something I just need to listen to.