Blowing Over

As time moves on, and I look back to June and July 2026, I suspect it will remain the first time when reality finally began to make consistent sense. I’ll remember the PostIt Note I stuck on a white board in my residency bedroom which simply stated ‘Let Yourself Heal’. I’ll consider the moment when I was able to put a traumatic portion of my life finally to rest. That grief will finally be accepted.

The biggest problem I have to cope with when it comes to reality on a daily basis involves how my brain constantly reframes my experiences in different lights. Many neurodivergent people I have spoken to over the years consider themselves time travellers: what may be happening in the moment is not actually THAT moment, but could be echoing a previous experience.

It could also feel as if it’s only an imaginary situation.

When I was offered the Residency, I was in shock for several days afterwards. Thinking back to all the times before when I imagined what that might do for my career, for my own confidence, of what might be achieved if I’d got one before this month, I realise now that I was absolutely not ready to do it. Of course it could have happened, but my path would have altered as a result.

Everything to this point has been absolutely necessary, even the shitty bits, and especially the moments where I found the confidence to say no to things and walk away. I accept the importance of failure in tempering my outlook and approach to how I write, and particularly what I am writing about. The benefit to my creative core has been seismic. That is also exactly the right word to describe it.

I accepted last week how much like the Thames Estuary I have become.

Estuaries have their own (often extremely temperamental) microclimates and are invariably as a result the sites for some of the most destructive natural events human beings ever experience, and yet we still build our homes next to them. The biodiversity benefits are well documented, but the emotional and mental ones continue to be overlooked. They are the spaces where diversity creates a balance for the planet. They are both compelling and potentially deadly.

The more I am drawn here, the greater my connections to the space become: changeable, unpredictable and often dangerous are all emotions that resonate keenly in me. However the constancy and predictability of the tides, the way that over time you can and do learn to read the signs in weather and temperature that predict an incoming shift, reminds me that negatives do not have you prevent you from making forward motion. Memory, observation and translation matter.

I owe a great deal to this place and always will.

I hope the rest of this year can be as educational and satisfying as the last seven days have been… and I truly believe that without what has just taken place, there would not have been an important shift in my emotional core. I can feel that odd, unfixed sensation even now, but it no longer frightens me. What has to happen next is as much about where I am resting as anything else.

We will not be still in this space now for very long.