Why I Write

Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times… How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood? Perhaps four or five more. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

Those words speak deep truth into my life. I have always been aware of its precious fragility, how swiftly it can be taken, how suddenly loved ones vanish from our lives.

I don’t remember a time I wasn’t bereaved. My mum died when I was just 9 years old. Thirteen years later, I lost my brother to a reckless driver and life splintered. Three years after that, three more members of my immediate family were gone within six months, including my beloved maternal grandad. By the age of 26, I was unsure of how to live in a world that had proven itself to be unsafe.

This is my fourth piece on Substack. Scribbled notes that have gathered metaphorical dust in my drafts folder, waiting for the right moment.

2026 is finally that moment, a threshold year in my life.

June of this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of losing my mum to a bleeding disorder and ten since my cancer diagnosis. Ten years since I made the impossible decision to refuse chemotherapy after surgery due to my own rare bleeding disorder.

And later this year, God willing, I will turn 60.

And breathe.

Moulded by loss, I fell into catastrophising, because tragedy shaped my formative years and I had learned to expect it. No amount of reasoning or logic could convince me otherwise.

Eventually I sought help from a therapist who introduced me to the theory of bent pennies. Each day of our lives is a penny, stacking into the shape of who we are. Each trauma bends those pennies, and the stack begins to tip. If we don’t find a way to name what is, the whole thing collapses.

When I reflected on my life, I realised my stack of pennies had been tipping for decades.

In that safe space, I was finally given permission to say ‘This is not OK. These losses are not OK’. And somehow, saying those words aloud and having someone else echo them for the first time, I began the gradual process of healing.

Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, whose teachings have shaped my faith in recent years, says something similar, ‘If we don’t transform our pain, we will transmit it’, and that is usually to those closest to us, the people we love and live with, and those who walk alongside us.

So this year of milestones feels the right time to begin.

I write in the hope of making space for others to speak, to name the losses that don’t follow timelines, the grief that doesn’t resolve, the impossible choices life sometimes asks of us.

I write from the edges of life, from the messiness and fragility, from the sacred moments where hope and beauty break through, where we stop pretending and allow healing to begin.

I write because this is a threshold year and life is not limitless.

Thank you for being here.