The Beginning of Becoming me

I was 10 when my mum bought me my first gratitude journal for Christmas. It was A5 and hot pink with a big white flower on the front, and inside the cover she had handwritten a note.

I can’t remember every word, but it began with “this is your gratitude journal.” What I remember most is how personal it felt.

That simple gift was the start of my love for writing, and the first time I learned how to put feelings I couldn’t say out loud onto paper.

That journal came at a time when life had already thrown my family into something impossibly difficult. My youngest brother, Joe, was diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy when he was just 2 years old.

DMD is a rare and life limiting muscle wasting condition. The future felt uncertain and nobody could say what lay ahead, or what it would look like.

“That simple gift was the start of my love for writing.”

Writing became the way I tried to process emotions that felt too heavy to speak.

It was sitting curled up on my bed with the pen in my hand, scribbling fast and hard when the tears came, slowing right down when I felt calmer, then reading back and realising that maybe the moment didn’t feel as heavy as it once did.

It was the way I could say what I never spoke out loud. It was me learning to make sense of the impossible.

Growing up knowing that one day my brother would lose his life young shaped everything for me: how I thought, how I worked, how I lived, and the decisions I made both big and small.

I had a very different view of the world from a young age, and that set me apart from my peers. It was isolating and scary, so I did anything I could to fit in — and some of those choices I’m not too proud of now.

“Growing up knowing one day my brother would lose his life young shaped everything.”

That early awareness of the fragility of life quickly became anxiety. In my 20s, it grew into panic attacks. In my 30s, it turned into depression.

For decades, anticipatory grief ruled me and I had no idea how to regain control.

By the time I was around 16, I had made a conscious choice: if I could just “help,” maybe it would all be ok.

Helping diluted the anger at the unjustness of my circumstances, made me feel useful and gave me what felt like a practical focus.

I thought if I could support my parents however I could, comfort my siblings, and prepare myself by absorbing as much knowledge as possible, somehow I could fix it. Or at the very least, protect the people I loved most from hurting.

Well, spoiler alert: I couldn’t.

In the middle of all that irrational logic, I now see something I couldn’t then. I was still a child. A child trying to carry the weight of an adult.

Trying to fix what could never be fixed, and most of all trying to shield my family from the most unimaginable pain. If I could take all of their pain even now, I would do it in a heartbeat.

“Helping diluted the anger at the unjustness of my circumstances.”

One of life’s many wake up calls came when my son was born in 2021. My first child. Edison’s arrival turned my whole world upside down.

But looking back, it was also the birth of me.

Next time, I’ll share how motherhood shook me in ways I didn’t expect, and how that unraveling opened the door to a new kind of becoming.