21

UNCOMFORTABLY NUMB

Nobody is the sum of their greatest mistakes. And yet it seems so much easier to focus on the times we fuck up than on our moments of goodness. Ruminating on every harsh word spoken to someone we love. Hating the part of us that eats until we feel sick. Letting anger be our decision-maker.

Shame is one of the most powerful human emotions. It’s also one of the most corrosive. For me, it’s Regina’s voice turned up full bore, telling me that I am unworthy, I am a fuck-up, I don’t deserve to be loved because I am bad to my core. Throughout my life I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time wrapping myself in shame’s discomfort. It makes me think of the things I’ve done that I can’t undo. Things that, no matter how hard I work at cultivating self-compassion, I just can’t forgive.

The world’s leading shame researcher, Brené Brown — whose books on vulnerability, imperfection, and courage have led me to conclude she is one of the wisest women alive — maintains there is a distinct difference between guilt and shame. Guilt allows us to measure our actions against the values we hold dear and use that emotional discomfort in an adaptive way. It’s an internal alarm encouraging us to be better. Shame is destructive. It tells us we’re undeserving of love and uses our poor behaviour as evidence. Put more simply, guilt is recognising you made a mistake. Shame is feeling you are that mistake.

Brown’s TED talk on the power of vulnerability is one of the most popular of all time. More than ten million people have seen it, and the transcript has been translated into 52 languages. She describes shame as a universal human emotion, at its core the sense that we are not enough: not thin enough, rich enough, good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, happy enough, and so on. It can be what drives our fear and our unhappiness, but also our anger. Being criticised can cut to the quick of that feeling of not being enough. Rather than sit with the discomfort, it’s easier to defend ourselves by lashing out and looking for someone to blame. But sometimes the shame is turned inwards, in acts of self-sabotage.

Alcohol has often been the gateway to my greatest shame. I’ve said and done things I can’t take back. I’ve made reckless decisions and caused great hurt to people I care about. There have been too many mornings where I’ve woken up with hazy memories and a nagging feeling that I made a dickhead of myself the night before, and had to sheepishly text friends to fill in the blanks. Sometimes, there is no fixing what I have done. As I struggled to return to moderation after my year off the booze, I came to realise that drinking to excess is directly linked to the feeling of shame. Booze had been my crutch since I was a teenager, when I was desperate to belong and my shame was at its peak, and in some ways I sought that familiarity. It’s that perversely satisfying feeling of picking the scab on a wound my body is trying to heal. I know it’s bad for me, but there’s something comforting in the pain.

I didn’t explore this in High Sobriety because I hadn’t yet made the connection. It was only through my work with Veronica that I started to see the extent to which drinking is linked to my core emotional issues. Alcohol can seem like a fast-track to happiness for all of us. Pure hedonism on tap. For an anxious brain, it’s an easy way to find release. Those first few glasses of wine are freeing, a blessed hour or so of respite from a mind in overdrive. But there’s the inevitable backlash the next morning, as my mind kicks the living shit out of me for daring to try to switch it off.

The way the body processes alcohol creates the perfect storm. When you’re drinking, it’s all fun and games. Booze slows down the nervous system, bringing a fuzzy sense of calm, merriment, and the urge to smile at strangers. But the next day, the system is depleted and needs a kickstart. Cortisol and adrenaline flood the body, helping to remove toxins but also sparking an antsy, restless feeling, which, for someone already prone to panic, is like waking up to find your world teetering on the precipice of a nuclear crisis. Then comes the speeding freight train of shame, guilt, and paranoia as every questionable decision you’ve ever made since the day you were born is replayed in a high-volume, Technicolor montage of absolute headfuckery. This is hangxiety. And it’s the absolute worst.

Rationally, I knew that drinking as a way of coping with life’s challenges was a terrible idea. I’d literally written a book about it. But despite all I’d learned during my year off the booze, I couldn’t always put it into practice. Alcohol was the quickest, most familiar painkiller I knew. Before everything fell apart at the end of 2014, I was back to medicating my weekends. It was a vicious cycle of having a few drinks to slow down the chatter in an over-stimulated brain, only to cop the horrors of hangxiety the next morning. Hangovers cause depleted levels of serotonin, and a drop in blood sugars, which always brought a heavy dose of the sads. Since the year off drinking, my tolerance for alcohol was far lower, so it didn’t take much for me to get drunk. And the hangovers were worse. Much worse. It was probably in part a natural consequence of getting older, but I was also starting to slip into a hole from which I would soon be unable to escape. The mornings after were really dark. I joked with friends about my ‘Suicide Sundays’, but it wasn’t funny. This poster girl for sobriety was completely losing her shit. I felt like a fraud and a failure.

The human psyche often makes us unconsciously repeat problematic behaviour as a way of reliving the past. In therapy, after I’d stopped drinking to give my full focus to the work ahead of me, it became abundantly clear that I had a pattern of unwittingly bringing about the very outcomes that scared me most, turning my core beliefs about myself into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I believed I was defective and unworthy of love, drinking to oblivion and making decisions that would alienate me from those I cared about was a superb way of proving that theory.

It was only when I read Jenny Valentish’s brutally honest memoir Women of Substances that I could fully acknowledge the roots of my rocky relationship with alcohol, and see that they stretched back well beyond my first drink. Like me, Jenny is a British-born, Victorian-based journalist in her early forties, who fell in love with binge drinking at the age of 13. Since then, she’s struggled with alcohol and drug use, and in her book she explores the unique pathways that women take into addiction and out again. I was immediately struck by the parallels in our stories: she’d been a fretful child, prone to catastrophising and overly fixated on morbid events. And just as I had when my book was released, she was feeling the pressure of talking about issues from her past she hadn’t yet fully reconciled with her present.

In the book, Valentish interviews dozens of addiction researchers as she tries to untangle the complex origins of her drinking and drug use. She outlines how childhood temperament is a major predictor of problematic substance use in adulthood. Pessimistic children who find it hard to bounce back from emotional challenges will view their lives as a series of pre-determined negative events, setting them up to fail. These are the children most likely to become adults who struggle with anxiety and depression and turn to alcohol or drugs as a coping method. I read this chapter nodding my head, remembering all the times I thought, Well, yeah, of course that would happen to an idiot like me — like the time I fell into the water off the coast of ‘Argentina’ as a child, or the many occasions Chris or Jason had had to help fix a glitch in my laptop or phone because I became utterly convinced that I was so cyber illiterate that technology must have cursed me.

Valentish’s research showed that if children also have difficulty regulating their emotions, they are at even greater risk of problems down the track. In homes where techniques of calming down are not modelled by a caregiver, it can be difficult for the child to know how to soothe themselves when they feel stressed. ‘If these skills are not observed and learned, the habit of self-regulation will not be routed into the neural pathways. Failure to learn might be through parental neglect or through watching parents catastrophise minor issues,’ she writes.

This gelled with what psychologist Andrew Fuller, one of the architects of the Kids Matter program, told me when I was looking at emotional literacy in schools. He said that if young people learned from an early age to recognise and regulate their feelings, we would see a reduction in violence and binge drinking — problems often fuelled by poor impulse control or a desire to mask anxiety. The kids who got really drunk or violent often had no idea how to form relationships. They were the same kids who were socially anxious and scared, and learned to resolve their problems by hitting someone or wiping themselves out with booze or drugs.

Valentish summarised the identified high-risk factors for problematic substance use as low resilience, poor self-regulation, low self-efficacy, and reactivity. When I looked at the list, I ticked almost all the boxes. And just as I’d realised that my shame and my alcohol use were intrinsically linked, Valentish noted that there was a danger this pattern can become comforting. ‘There’s a familiar cycle of disappointment and then — if you grow up to coddle yourself with drugs and alcohol — self-soothing. In time, defeat becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Things are not for the likes of you. Something simply cannot be done. There is no point.’

When I read this part of her book, I broke down. It was like looking in a mirror. Each time I’ve found myself back in a cycle of problematic drinking, that twinge of defeat has been acute. It’s brought with it a repetitive narrative of profound shame. Why can’t I be better than this? Why did I have that last glass of wine? Why did I stay out till 3.00 am when I promised myself I’d be home by midnight? I took a whole year off the booze and I’ve learnt nothing. My happy-ever-after wasn’t meant to go like this.

Piling shame on top of guilt has never helped to change behaviour. And when I look more closely, I can see there are long periods of time where my drinking has not been problematic. I’m not helpless. I can make choices. Moderation is not beyond me. So why do I go through long stretches of having a healthy relationship with alcohol and then slip into periods where I’m drinking like it’s an Olympic sport? And it isn’t just me. The messages are still coming from people who struggle with moderate drinking and contact me after reading High Sobriety. People want answers. The most common question: how do you drink now? Have I managed to find a way not to slip back into old habits? It is unsettling how many of them seem to link their salvation to mine. Why are so many of us still soothing our emotional pain with alcohol?

The prevailing wisdom is that alcohol and drugs contain powerful chemical hooks that inevitably lead to dependency. The dominant treatment approach is to view addiction as a disease that has hijacked the brain. Once an addict, always an addict. Abstinence is the only cure. For people with a predisposition, just one drink or a single drug hit will be enough to send them hurtling back to dependency. This is what author and journalist Johann Hari thought until he embarked on a three-year, 50,000-kilometre odyssey that turned his idea of addiction on its head. His subsequent bestselling book Chasing the Scream charts that journey, and has huge implications not only for the war on drugs but also for the way we view ourselves and the shame we feel when we fuck things up during debauched bouts of self-sabotage. When I met Hari, he was in Australia for a series of sold-out talks on drug reform. His book advances a theory about addiction that spoke to me on a deeply personal level. Sitting down with him face-to-face in the foyer of The Age, I gained a fascinating insight into the nature of dependency and its link to our emotional health.

He told me how the chemical-hooks theory of addiction was born out of early twentieth-century experiments in which caged rats were given two water bottles, one containing only water and the other laced with heroin or cocaine. Invariably the rats preferred the drugged water, and would go back compulsively until they overdosed and died. But Hari wondered why most hospital patients who are routinely given high-dose medical heroin for pain relief simply stop upon discharge, with very few going on to develop addiction. He found the answer in a 1970s Canadian experiment called Rat Park. This time the rats, instead of being left in sparse cages, were offered a choice of clean or drugged water in a caged playground of coloured balls, wheels, playmates, and abundant food. They showed little interest in the drugged water, and none became addicted. Hari told me, ‘It’s not the chemical that’s your cage. The overwhelming reason for addiction is the pain and isolation the individual feels. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It’s human connection.’

Hari’s theory that pain and a lack of connection create the ideal breeding ground for addiction helps explain why poverty, disadvantage, homelessness, discrimination, neglect, abuse, and trauma are so often linked to substance abuse. And why mental-health problems go hand in hand with drug and alcohol dependency. At any given time, around half of the inmates in our prisons are suffering from mental illness and struggling with addiction. The punitive ‘tough love’ approach only deepens a user’s sense of shame and alienation. In places where compassionate drug policies have been adopted, the results have been astonishing. Portugal, which had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, decriminalised all drugs in 2001. The money saved on punishing addicts was used to fund comprehensive treatment services, job-creation programs, and training courses to reintegrate users back into the community. It led to a 50 per cent drop in injecting drug use, and huge reductions in street crime, addiction, overdose deaths, and HIV transmissions.

When you remove shame, you restore dignity and hope. Writing in The Huffington Post a few weeks after we met, in an article that was shared more than half a million times, Hari said human beings are bonding animals who need love and connection to thrive. ‘But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the internet,’ he wrote. ‘The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live — constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.’

Whether it’s binge eating a slab of chocolate, scrolling through my phone, or drinking more than I planned to, the compulsion almost always comes back to the same issue — a need to numb my pain with external distractions. It’s the pull of maladaptive but familiar habits. It can’t be a coincidence that the more difficult life becomes, the harder I find it to live with moderation. It’s the desperate search for something that’s always just outside of my grasp. In those times, I’ve come to realise that if my cage is a lack of connection, that disconnect is so often with myself. Drinking too much is just another example of the search for an external fix. But I don’t have an easy answer for the readers who want to know, ‘What happened next?’ My love–hate relationship with alcohol is one I continue to negotiate. For the most part, I do an okay job. But when things start to get out of balance I know that I have to take a long hard look at the ways in which I’m caged. Breaking free means learning not to numb the pain but lean into it and face what’s there.

The question I’m asked the most after ‘How do you drink now?’ is, ‘How is Fiona?’ It’s another question with no easy answer. In the final chapters of High Sobriety, I describe the sudden and unexpected death of my oldest friend’s five-year-old son two days before Christmas 2011. Jude was the kind of child who took your breath away. With a shock of messy blond hair and mesmerising blue eyes, he was a crazy kind of beautiful. When he died, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t leading the six o’clock news. In those first few days, shock gave way to grief, which came in a flailing, hanging-on-by-the-fingertips blur. As I prepared for the flight home, I found myself in the self-help section of a Melbourne bookshop, searching for ways to help my friend. My impotence was matched only by the abject futility of the titles I found: When Bad Things Happen to Good People; Beyond the Broken Heart: a journey through grief. It was like trying to fight a firestorm with a watering can.

I had no idea how to talk to the bereaved. Until then, I’d mostly avoided those who’d lost loved ones. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. In a culture that’s distinctly uncomfortable with pain, this was a safe position. We don’t like to look that kind of loss in the eye for fear it might swallow us. But then it happens to someone you love, and you can no longer avoid it. In the days leading up to Jude’s funeral I spent a lot of time at Fiona’s house, which seemed at once smaller without the presence of her knockabout wee boy and not nearly large enough to accommodate her family’s loss. One morning, I walked into their home to find Fiona sitting on the living-room floor with her seven-year-old daughter, Isla, folding pieces of card. When I got closer I saw it was the order of service for Jude’s funeral, his cheeky smile and pink cheeks beaming back at me from the front of every copy. I felt the breath leave my body. There were no words. So I got down on the floor and started folding.

Later, Fiona would tell me that she felt guilty for all the times she’d turned her head from other people’s bereavement. She’d never once sent a condolence card or been able to talk to someone about a lost loved one. She’d only experienced small losses and had never considered how grief would feel. It was a shock to discover that it was an experience not just of deep emotional sadness but also of searing physical pain. ‘In those early days I was thinking, How on earth can I live like this? I started to count out how many years I potentially had left to live, and it frightened me that I could live for 50 years and feel the same pain every single day,’ she told me. ‘I had to make a conscious decision to try to heal, and actively chose to get through the early months as best as I could.’

Fiona sought support online, finding people who had survived the loss of a child. She discovered that grief is a social experience. Just as she had joined baby groups to teach her how to bathe her newborn, where to buy nappies, and how best to manage sleep deprivation, she found people who were slightly further down the road with grief than she was. She credits these people, many of whom she has never met, with saving her sanity and helping her find a path to a new life.

It’s not surprising Fiona was blindsided by the realities of grief. Unlike some cultures — in which wailing rituals, open caskets, and unbridled public displays of mourning are an important part of the healing process — in our buttoned-up Western world, grieving is something to be done discreetly and behind closed doors. Our fixation with happiness has taught us to airbrush death out of life’s narrative. I read a piece by a psychotherapist who said silent mourning has become so normalised it has given way to a phenomenon of ‘car grieving’, where the soundproofed isolation of our car is the only safe place to express our most profound emotions.

When I came back to Australia after Jude’s funeral, I felt utterly helpless and so far from Fiona at a time when she needed me most. I spent many mornings in the toilets at work sobbing. Then I’d go back to my desk and quietly do my job. When I was a teenager experiencing death after death in my family, I felt the same sense of secrecy. Grief was not a public act. There was a time and place for mourning, and even then it was expected to be measured and muted. When my Dad clutched my hand and broke down at my uncle’s funeral, I remember being more confronted by this public display of emotion than I was by the sight of the coffin.

But grief is not meant to be quiet. It can be a skin-scratching evisceration that rattles through every nerve ending and rasps on each breath. Denying it an outlet isn’t healthy. And it’s an insult to those we’ve lost. When you make space for it, grief can be the grandest monument to love. The exquisite pain is a measure of our loss. And yet, there are arbitrary time limits placed on the bereaved, dictating the point at which their pain is expected to have run its course. Fourteen days, if we’re to go by the DSM’s criteria. After that, the bereaved are no longer grieving — they’re mentally ill.

For Fiona, one of the hardest things in the aftermath of Jude’s death was feeling as though he was being erased. In the months after the funeral, once she and her husband David had returned to work, it was as if she was expected to move on. The silence was suffocating. Some people would say anything to avoid talking about Jude, terrified it would trigger more hurt. It had the opposite effect. She told me, ‘I’m not over the death of my baby boy and I never will be, so the mention of his name doesn’t remind me that he died; it lets me know that people remember that he lived.’

On 23 December 2018, it will be seven years since Jude died. As Isla navigates the challenges of high school without her little brother, Fiona’s sense of loss remains ever present. By any measure, she will always be grieving. She does not have a major depressive disorder, although she would have met the diagnostic criteria many times since the death of her son. She is not sick. She has simply found a way to accommodate her pain.

Her explanation of how she had found ways to keep going simultaneously reassured and devastated me: ‘I need people not to misunderstand my sense of being okay. They shouldn’t decide that I’ve moved on, accepted my loss or, God forbid, replaced my precious son. Instead, people should know that it’s possible to choose to be okay while at the same time living with a broken heart.’

In the lead-up to the first anniversary of Jude’s death, Fiona swapped the traditional Christmas advent calendar for a journal that marked one thing each day for which she was grateful. Some days it was the simple things that not so long ago had seemed impossible. The familiar sights of her home town that in the acute phase of her grief had looked abnormal, almost surreal, like shifting shapes in a Salvador Dalí painting. Now, she could enjoy a walk across the Braid Hills, looking out across her beautiful Edinburgh, and it no longer felt like a foreign land. It was the city that was home to the memories of her boy, and for that she was thankful. There was the weekly Friday breakfast with her girlfriends, lunch with her mum, and the restored ability to laugh and mean it.

Ten months after Jude died, Fiona gave birth to a baby girl. It wasn’t planned, but Marley’s arrival was a gift. She brought great joy and made life busy. Isla said Jude had sent her to them. Marley has her brother’s blonde hair and many of his traits. Of all the people in Fiona’s life, Marley talks to her about Jude more than anyone else, even though she never knew him. ‘It’s probably because she doesn’t worry about how I’ll feel and consequently it doesn’t feel forced or awkward. I love these conversations because they aren’t about the pain, they’re about him and what he did and which toys he loved,’ Fiona said. ‘That makes him alive again, just for that little while. I’ve lived with his loss for as many years as he was alive now, and I still prefer to talk about his life more than his death.’

In 2013, I took a beach holiday with Fiona and her family to Nerja on Spain’s Costa del Sol — a resort town I’d last been to with her when we were 21. During that trip I saw up close how the loss of Jude permeates their lives on a daily basis in ways I hadn’t even considered. On the beach one morning, a retired English couple started chatting to Fiona and David about Marley, who was still a baby, and Isla, who was nine. Noting the age gap, the woman asked, ‘Will you try for a boy next?’ I wanted to throw myself across the sand like a human shield, as if somehow I could deflect the words before they made impact. But they hung in the air. And then calmly, politely, Fiona replied, ‘Oh no, I think we’re done.’

At dinner that night I told David I was amazed by the way they had both handled the interaction. He explained it was a frequent occurrence. Another tricky question was, ‘How many children do you have?’ In that moment they’re forced to decide whether they say ‘two’ and deny the existence of their beloved son, or tell the truth and embark on an awkward conversation with a virtual stranger they might never meet again.

When I spend time with Fiona and her family, I am always acutely aware that there is someone missing. But the fact that she and David found a way to survive has provided strength in moments when I thought I couldn’t carry on.

It was during that Spanish holiday when my anxiety started to spin out of control. While lying on a sun lounger reading a potboiler crime thriller, I had a violent panic attack. The azure Mediterranean horizon tilted from side to side, and I gulped down more air than my lungs could take. It made no sense. I was on a beautiful beach with my closest childhood friend; I’d just published a book in Australia and was about to launch it with family and other loved ones at home in Edinburgh. I should have been happy. But I couldn’t breathe. I felt so guilty when Fiona had endured so much worse. After a day or so of trying to hide it, I told her things were unravelling. I detailed the dread and the hyper-awareness and the panicked sense of wanting to run from my own brain, and although she’d never experienced anxiety in this form, she understood exactly what it was like to have to fight your way through the day moment by moment. She didn’t tell me to pull myself together or try to soothe me with platitudes. Instead she listened, told me that what I was feeling must be really shit, and asked how she could help. Then she told me what someone had once said to her: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’

I think we can thank Winston Churchill for that piece of wisdom. It’s one I have come back to again and again. Some days all you can do is keep breathing. And then, one day, you get to bedtime and realise you didn’t have to remind yourself to breathe that day. When you touch the bottom of your despair, it’s possible to find reserves of resilience you never knew you had. And it can bring into sharp relief just how short our time on this planet is.

For Fiona, who was always an anxious flyer but stopped flying altogether after the September 11 terror attacks, losing Jude meant travelling again. She had to live the fullest life, even if that meant doing things that were outside her comfort zone. Turbulence, take-offs, and landings are still terrifying, but the fear no longer controls her. Grief has changed things in so many ways. ‘I do live differently. I take more holidays and I let Marley sleep in my bed every now and again without worrying about the consequences. I spend more money,’ she told me. ‘However, there are times when I’m more vulnerable. I can be knocked more easily and I can’t always rely on my emotions. I might see something that knocks the wind out of me and then I can struggle for some time. Christmas is always tricky, and so is his birthday. I have to prepare myself for that ahead of time.

‘Having said that, I know I will come back up again. It’s the rollercoaster, after all, and I know that I’ve felt the lowest that I could ever imagine and I came back from that.’

In Buddhism, the path to enlightenment starts with bearing witness to what we’re experiencing — good, bad, or indifferent. By denying uncomfortable emotions or trying to push the discomfort away, we stay mired in our suffering and lie to ourselves about the realities of life. Grasping for happiness and certainty at a time of deep anguish and instability is like trying to throw a party while your house burns down around you. Having the courage to sit with suffering is not easy when every instinct tells you to flee from it or numb the ache with alcohol, Facebook, or buying stuff you don’t really need. But as Fiona discovered in the most painful way imaginable, when the worst thing happens it can forge a form of clarity that only the deepest adversity can provide. When your world is tipped on its axis, the view can never be the same again.

As I look back to the days I was skirting the border between the living and the dead, I wouldn’t wish it away. If I could change one thing, it would be to spare the people who love me the distress of witnessing it and carrying the weight of my despair. But I’m grateful for the experience. As the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi said, ‘The wound is where the light enters you.’ It has opened me up and enriched my life in more ways than it has hurt me. Rather than catastrophising about setbacks, I now try to see them as opportunities. Every difficult experience, every challenging emotion, is a chance for renewal.

I’m not advocating a trite ‘everything happens for a reason’ approach to suffering. Nor do I want to suggest for a moment that those who have experienced the devastation of bereavement wouldn’t do anything to have their loved ones back. Life can be random and cruel, and our struggles ongoing. There are experiences so traumatic they threaten to destroy the very essence of who we are. But just because we feel like we’re broken doesn’t mean we are. In Japanese, kintsugi (golden joinery) is the ancient art of repairing fine pottery with powdered gold. When the cracks are painstakingly filled with luminous golden seams, it shows that nothing is ever beyond repair. As a philosophy, kintsugi is the act of embracing imperfections, wearing our emotional wounds on the outside. Rather than trying to hide the bits of us that are scarred, we make them part of a masterpiece. When we put the pieces back together, they might not look the same, but they can still shine. The broken becomes beautiful. When I view my life’s most difficult events through the prism of kintsugi, I can see that the problem child is not a problem at all. She is the gold that holds the vase together.

For Fiona, the golden seams in her life are the love she has for Jude and the unexpected legacies he left behind. In those early months, there was no room for observing her pain; it was a simple case of survival. But now, things are different. ‘I do embrace that suffering and I can scale my levels of happiness by having those early months as a baseline. I think I’m better able to appreciate the things that make me happy and feel grateful for them,’ she said. ‘I definitely live in a less careful way, not trying to micromanage decisions as much as I did. I’m also more keenly aware of people who are living in pain for prolonged periods of time. Watching the news, I’m more closely connected to the pain of the people who are digging in rubble for their families or watching their children die from malnutrition. It’s not a feeling of removed sympathy but empathy, a very human connection.’

When I couldn’t imagine living through another minute, I would listen to American Tibetan Buddhist and author Pema Chödrön’s meditations. Her book, When Things Fall Apart, gifted to me by a thoughtful colleague at a time when I could not yet see that I needed this wisdom, has become my Bible. Chödrön points out that ‘[t]o be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest’. Life is not a straight road to the fairytale ending. It is a twisting, complicated route populated by speedbumps and landmines, scenic views and beautiful sunrises, and a whole lot of beige, mundane days we will instantly forget. Whenever I feel like I’m falling, I listen to Chödrön’s wisdom, and find solace as she guides me to connect my pain with the hundreds of thousands of other people around the world who are suffering the same pain in that moment. It doesn’t remove the anxiety completely, but it always provides comfort, and a reminder that although what I am feeling is difficult, it is normal. It is human. My brokenness is not evidence of dysfunction — it is proof that, like all of us, I am a wonderfully flawed work in progress.