Making space

‘Your body has taken the car keys away.'

I am part of a group called Rest, Repair, Recover. It is for people like me, who live with Long Covid, and it was set up by a coach and yoga teacher called Suzy Bolt. I found it in April this year when, after nearly a year of my health being like a rollercoaster, I knew I needed to do something to get myself back to stability. Initially, I'd hoped to carve out an hour or 90 minutes of my day every Tuesday and Thursday to join the Zoom classes, move gently, have some conscious rest and chat to fellow long-haulers. But meetings and work commitments soon eroded that time, and I was snatching quick half-hour slots when I could and promising myself I'd do the classes on catch-up.

At that point, I was on the upslope of the rollercoaster. I'd been on a walking and birdwatching holiday and had managed to walk nearly 10,000 steps some days. I had done my first in-person workshop at work since September 2022. I'd even managed to go to Jamatkhana for prayers. But as I climbed the heights of recovery, the demands accumulated. An onslaught of work projects. My sister's upcoming 40th birthday. A 2-day training programme for leaders in my religious community that I was designing. Making the cake for my friend's wedding. The usual round of domestic duties. Friends who were in tough places in their lives. Trying to carve out time for meditation, prayer and movement. My long-suffering partner who got the scraps of my time and energy that weren't going on work.

By June, I was clinging on by a thread at work. My carefully constructed veneer of competence was crumbling. Emails went unanswered, reports delayed. I found myself looking at a report that I could have edited in my sleep, and couldn't find the will to edit even a single word. One of my leadership team colleagues was already on sabbatical and another was due to go in September. I felt obliged to push through. 'Once I get this done, it will be better.' 'Once my new line report is more established in her role, I'll have more space.' 'Once I kick myself up the arse, I'll be able to tackle all the things.' I was going to bed thinking of all the things I had to do, and couldn't do. I was getting up the next morning telling myself that it was my own silly fault I'd had poor sleep, and that was no excuse not to get on with it.

My sister's 40th came and went. I made a slap-up afternoon tea for close family and friends, scones and all. We ate the leftovers for three days. My friend's wedding was the following weekend. I'd taken the whole week off. Thursday, I baked cake layers. Friday, I baked more cake layers, took the tube to the Ismaili Centre for the religious wedding ceremony, had coffee with a friend, stayed for prayers. Saturday, stacking and icing the cake, with a pause for lunch with my parents. Sunday, the wedding. The final touches to the cake went on at 11:30. At 11:40, my sister called. "I have a dent in my head, I can't come to the wedding!" It turned out she had fallen from a stool and injured her head badly enough to need stitches. By 1pm, I was in a taxi on the way to the wedding and she was in an ambulance. She was stitched up, and went home. I read a Rumi poem about love and toasted my friends with sparkling water. By the time I left, the dancing had only just started and there was almost no cake left.

Monday and Tuesday were spent in bed.

Still I did not learn. Back to work I went. I took a sick day each week. I went to an in-person bid interview. We did not win. I went on a weekend retreat and gave myself no recovery time either side. I spent my evenings training up the delivery team for the 2-day training. I kept telling myself that I wasn't enough, I wasn't doing enough, it wasn't good enough. I still needed to do more, be more. I was falling further and further behind. The rollercoaster, by now, wasn't so much on the downslope as derailed and heading for the skids.

When the crash came, it started almost imperceptibly. I had the merest suggestion of a cold. A half-day sore throat and nothing else... apart from fatigue that kept me in bed and as non-functional as I'd been in the first days of Covid over a year before. A day off work became a week, became a request to be signed off for two weeks. I spent a tearful weekend going back and forth in my head, and in conversation with my partner, about whether I could go back to work, and how I was going to deal with the huge backlog when I did. By this point, conversations happened in 10-minute increments, as I was too breathless for more.

The following Thursday, I shared my dilemma in the weekly question-and-answer session that followed our Zoom class. "Your body has taken the car keys away," said Suzy. I could no longer be trusted to look after my body, so it wasn't going to give me the option any more. I realised I had no choice. I had to make space for my recovery and health, and that meant something had to give. That something was work, or so I thought. I was signed off from mid-August until the end of the year. And almost from the moment I made the decision, my body finally began to relax. I could rest without ruminating. I slept deeply and without dreams. I shambled out of the house for stuttering 10-minute walks in the late August sun without guilt for all that was left undone. I prioritised breathwork, gentle movement and rest. Slowly, 10 minutes became 15, became 20. The first day I baked again, for pleasure, not obligation, was pure joy. I could pay attention to my friends again. I could be fully present with my partner.

I was still sometimes tempted to do too much. I still found myself saying 'but I have to do this.' I still found myself driven by the fear of disappointing people, of not being enough. But under the surface, a new way of being was starting to emerge. I was starting to pace myself. I was starting to set boundaries. I could say 'please have a backup ready in case I'm too ill to do this,' or 'I'd love to but I'll have to let you know on the day depending on how I'm feeling' or 'thank you so much for thinking of me, I'm flattered that you would ask, but I don't have the capacity to take this on.'

More importantly, I was starting to prioritise differently. Rest, breathwork, gentle movement and meditation became increasingly non-negotiable. Naps were planned into the day. I focused on the things that brought me ease and joy. I re-prioritised my spiritual practice, from which I'd been increasingly disconnected. I kept reminding myself that treating myself with kindness was for the benefit of all beings, that I am not separate from the world I so deeply want to heal.

Perhaps most of all, I am starting to see the possibility of letting go of the story that I am not enough. I am starting to wonder what it might be like to let go of being driven by the fear of disappointing people. I am starting to consider how it might be to step off the treadmill of always pushing through because I am scared to let people down.

And in the space left by the absence of that story, perhaps more can emerge. There is room for creativity, to write for myself, not for work. There is room to consider how I truly want to live and what I actually want to do with this one wild and precious life. There is room to go to the dark places and not be afraid of them taking away my functioning. There is room to be deeply with my friends, my partner and myself. There is room where the Divine Presence may, in time, once again make itself known in my life. There is room for gratitude, and generosity. There is room for not-knowing. And finally, there is room for healing.

Time to Talk, mental health and guilt-trippy Facebook posts

Now, this is a nice confluence of events. Over the last few weeks I've noticed a proliferation of guilt-trippy facebook posts that run something like this:

- Mention of mental health awareness
- Mention of being there for people, having chocolate etc
- Guilt trip - I bet X% of people won't post this

These posts have left me torn. I am pleased that people are mentioning the words 'mental health' without getting all weird about it. And the offer of chocolate, real or virtual, is rather nice. But then I read the guilt trip and my heart sinks. As though our moral worth is dependent on whether we copy and paste a facebook status. And all the lovely, open-hearted words in the rest of the post vanish into thin air. I've wanted to post a riposte, but other events have rather taken over in the last week or so.

And then today is Time to Talk day, spearheaded by the Time to Change campaign. A perfect opportunity to talk about mental health awareness and really being there for people who are suffering and struggling.

And in an even more interesting confluence of events, I read this today: http://www.frominsultstorespect.com/2015/03/14/from-psychiatric-name-calling-to-plain-humane-english/. It resonated pretty strongly with me, although I know I don't have a lot of experience to draw from. What I do know is that I have a really ambivalent attitude to seeing my own suffering as 'mental illness.' On the one hand, a label like 'depression' was really useful, at various points. It meant that people treated my erratic behaviour with a bit more kindness than perhaps they might otherwise have done. I think it helped me a bit to move away from the persistent 'you are weak, pull yourself together, snap out of it' stream of thoughts that plagued me. It helped me not to feel quite so much that it was a moral failing on my part. It had practical benefits too - a bit more time to finish my Master's dissertation, in particular.

On the other hand, I never really bought the 'brain chemistry' explanation for what I was feeling. I knew that my emotional responses were all over the place, and there was no apparent reason for me to feel so disproportionately empty, and angry, and bleak, and wanting to disappear. And yet, it did have meaning. My episodes of depression - especially the two more recent ones - have been followed by breakthroughs and new insights. Through plumbing the depths of my own suffering, I realised how much of it was caused not by my brain chemistry but by my lack of kindness towards myself and by some deeply ingrained false beliefs about who I was and who I felt I should be. It took a lot of hard self-examination, supported by very kind friends, teachers and therapists, to have those breakthroughs. It was painful, and I often didn't have the energy for much else. Not to mention that it was expensive. And perhaps if I'd believed in the brain chemistry explanation I wouldn't have gone down that road. I might have tried other, more medical means, to 'fix' myself. I might even have believed that I wasn't fixable.

I'm still not sure what really caused my depression, or how to think about mental illness in general, not just mine. There are more conversations to be had here, I am sure.

But there's also a more immediate conversation to be had. One of the reasons I'm so passionate about Time to Talk day is because I tried and failed to hide what was going on for me and it made it worse. I felt more isolated and more desperate. And when I shared it, I realised that people did understand, and they didn't think less of me, and, to my enduring shock, they love me still. And so it matters to me that you, reading this post, have somewhere that you feel safe to share your suffering as and when you need it - whether you call it mental illness or not. And if I'm that person, then that's an honour and a privilege and I will honour it as best I can.

One soul (reprise)

Scattered thoughts from a weekend in which the President of the USA banned all citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US, even if they had green cards.

By one stroke of the pen, families have been separated. Jobs, homes, marriages, university places can be stripped away in a moment. There are real lives, people like you and me, being affected by this policy. My heart cannot fathom how much pain they must be feeling, how much fear and terror and uncertainty there must be, and it hurts in empathy with them. 

'O mankind, we have created you male and female and made you nations and tribes that ye might know one another.' (Qur'an, 49:13 (excerpt))

There is so much pain. The pain of those whose lives have been ripped apart by this travel ban or who live in fear of such a rupture. And equally, the pain of those in the rust belt who can see only the loss of their jobs and livelihoods, who live in a grinding poverty that I can only imagine, and who understandably fear change and further loss. I read today a story of a white woman who grew up in Birmingham (UK, not Alabama) and saw her neighbourhood change to become somewhere that she felt unsafe. It made me uncomfortable in its racist overtones and yet there was real pain there. I can't ignore that.

I know two things:

1. This is an injustice and must be stopped.

2. I cannot allow this to make me hate or dehumanise anyone, no matter how deeply I disagree with them.

And yet how desperately hard it is to hold on to both of these things. And yet the Qur'an is so blindingly clear. 'Be aware of your Lord, who created you from a single soul.' (4:1 (excerpt)). If I believe that, I must find a way to act for justice, yet without hatred. 

I find myself aware of my privilege, too. I have a British passport. I speak English with an accent that does not give away my ethnic or religious background. I am well educated, middle class and well off. I look white, mostly dress white, and pass as white, for all that I identify as brown. I am not the target of hate on a daily basis. All of these are a privilege. How do I use that privilege to speak out against injustice, without patronising those who have direct experience of that injustice?

Standing against oppression

Without knowing chapter and verse, I have always believed that my faith entails standing against oppression and for justice. I was always told that the Qur'an condemned oppression (see, for example, 42:39-44), and the stories I loved of the Prophet and Imam Ali reinforced that lesson. But it goes deeper than that - it goes back to the 'one soul' premise. If I'm serious about that premise, then I cannot let injustice stand, even if it happens to distant others. And that's as true of police brutality to black Americans (#blacklivesmatter) as it is of this travel ban.

So I will be standing outside 10 Downing Street tomorrow. I can't think of anything else that I can legitimately do from here (please do send further recommendations). If I get time, I will be standing with a sign that quotes Matthew 25: I was a stranger, and ye took me in... Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25: 36, 40 (excerpts)). By all accounts, Theresa May is a committed Christian, so these words should have some resonance.

Only love will destroy hatred

In this world

Hate never yet dispelled hate.

Only love dispels hate.

This is the law,

Ancient and inexhaustible.

You too shall pass away.

Knowing this, how can you quarrel?

(The Dhammapada)

Reading this again, I know it to be true, in my own heart and experience. I can't explain it and it probably isn't rational but I have faith that if we can embody love, in all that we do, rest in the Source of love, however we might experience that (call him Allah or call him al-Rahman, to Him belong the most beautiful names), it does make a difference. I am called again to live with love, to love even those I don't like, to meet every stranger with love as best I can. I'll be doing a formal loving-kindness (metta) meditation every day this week, and calling Ya Rahman Ya Rahim whenever I have a spare moment, and I have to hope that that helps somehow, if only in soothing my troubled heart and making me more open to loving others.

Hee Munjo Deen Ai post 4 - Sherbet and Cake

79 years ago today, Prince Karim al-Hussaini, now the Aga Khan and the 49th Imam of the Shi'a Imami Ismaili Muslims, was born in Geneva. Every year, the Salgirah, or birthday, of the Imam is an occasion for huge rejoicing, for jamatkhanas everywhere to be packed to the rafters with people dressed up to the nines.

It's a celebration not just of one man and the tremendous difference he has made to the quality of life, spiritual and material, of millions of people across the world, but of the presence of a living spiritual guide. It is an outpouring of joy that there remains on this earth someone descended from the Prophet and from Ali, with both the authority to interpret the faith for the present day, and, somehow, the "light" that can't quite be explained, that enables him to do so with a level of wisdom and compassion that are extra-ordinary. It is an occasion to remember that, as he tells us so frequently, his guiding, supporting hand is on the shoulder of each one of us, upholding us in his love and care.

(There will be more posts on the Imam, and on the concept of the Imam, but to get some measure of the man, have a listen to his recent lecture at Harvard University: http://www.theismaili.org/news-events/increasingly-fragmented-planet-need-cosmopolitan-ethic-hazar-imam-tells-harvard-audience).

In the South Asian tradition of Ismailism, any big happy occasion, including weddings and religious festivals like Salgirah, is celebrated with "sherbet and cake." Sherbet is a drink of sweetened milk flavoured with rosewater, coloured pink and topped with chopped pistachios. Its rose pink colour, studded with green, and delicate flavour, are indelibly associated with rejoicing in my mind. (It helps that I love the taste of it, too). After the jamatkhana ceremonies tonight, everyone will gather in the social hall, have a glass of sherbet (or several) and a piece of cake, bemoan the long queues to get said sherbet and cake, and catch up with friends and family, including those whom we might not see very often.

Prevented by illness from attending jamatkhana tonight and enjoying sherbet and cake in the company of friends and family, I created my own tribute to this little celebration by making a cake flavoured with rosewater and studded with pistachios (pictured above). I will recite the ginan, the devotional poem traditional for this occasion, which calls on us to rejoice in the presence of the True Guide, and I will savour my sherbet-flavoured cake, and I will be thankful beyond words for the wisdom, love and guidance of the man who is my spiritual father and mother, my Imam, whose words are truth and whose actions are love.

Salgirah Mubarak.

Hee Munjo Deen Ai post 3 - one soul

O mankind! Be conscious of your Lord Who created you from a single soul and  from it created its mate and from them twain hath spread abroad a multitude of men and women. (Qur'an 4:1)

I have loved this verse of the Qur'an since it was chosen as the motto for the Aga Khan's Golden Jubilee in 2007. In choosing this verse, the Aga Khan (the spiritual leader of the Ismaili tradition to which I belong) was, I think, making a powerful statement about the unity of human beings across those frontiers which traditionally divide us: race, gender, class, religion, language, our own sense of superiority and inferiority. That year, as in previous years, he emphasised again and again that the so-called "clash of civilisations" was really a clash of ignorance. He underlined over and over that the diversity within the Ismaili community - global and local - was a source of strength, and urged us, his followers, to come together as the brothers and sisters we claimed ourselves to be.

I always associate this verse with a ritual that takes place at the end of the Du'a, our set prayer. We turn to the person beside us, whether we know them or not, take their hand, look into their eyes and wish them "shah-jo-didar." It's hard to translate that wish - it's essentially wishing for the other person to be blessed with Divine Light, to which no worldly joys can compare. It's the highest thing you could possibly wish for someone. In that moment, no matter how different we are, we share that same deepest longing - for love, for light, for freedom, for something beyond all of this - and we wish it for each other as we wish it for ourselves. It's over in a flash, but sometimes I am shaken by the stark openness of that connection.

Some days I feel the weight of this verse lay heavy on me. Can I look Donald Trump, or Muhammad Emwazi, face to face, eye to eye, and feel in my blood, in my heart, that we come from a single soul? My ego screams "no," it wants to assert its difference, its distinctiveness. They are not like me. I would not be like them. And yet, and yet, the Qur'an is so clear, so strident. Who am I to argue with the Divine Word?

And if I'm honest, I sense it, too, our common humanity. These actions that are so different from my own probably stem from the same fears and needs that I have, that are part of the human condition, that we all know (but would rather not admit to). The need to be seen, to be valued, to be loved, the need to make a difference, the need to be right, to be known to be right, the need to feel safe and secure, the need for control and power. And the fear, the deep irrational all-consuming fear - fear of loss, fear of the unknown, fear of seeming less than I am, fear of isolation. I have no choice but to come face to face with my own darknesses in the darknesses of others. To quote the science-fiction author Orson Scott Card: "sickness and healing are in every heart. Death and deliverance are in every hand."

This also crops up closer to home. I notice my tendency, when I am in conflict with someone, to be dismissive of them "he's just a jerk, a dickhead, an idiot, a narcissist. She's just a bitch, she doesn't know what she's talking about." But the vision of the world that I have, centred on this verse, doesn't let me do that for long. If I'm going to take this world-view seriously, if I really believe that we're created from one soul, I can't just toss people aside like this. I have to stop, and breathe, and recognise their humanity, and that they may be as right in their own eyes as I am in mine, and try and find some understanding, some compassion. It slows me down. I'm less invested in being right, when I take this view, and more interested in finding common ground.

Funnily enough, I've found the Buddhist loving-kindness (metta) meditation practice the most powerful way of connecting with the sense that we are created from one soul. It takes it beyond an intellectual proposition into something experienced and deeply felt. I resist doing it (that ego again) but I notice that when I do, I can relate more openly to people. My experience of relational meditation practices, sitting face to face with a partner or in a circle, and sharing what matters, bringing openness and kindness to listening and speaking, has also put me in powerful and immediate contact with the otherness, and the single-souled-ness, of another person. Sometimes it's as if all the barriers melt away and we are just there, in all our complexity and rawness and vulnerability, face-to-face and heart-to-heart, and I know with absolute and unshakeable certainty that we are of one essence. Any my eloquence is simply not up to putting the beauty of that into words.

Hee munjo deen ai Post 2 - praying for peace

Allahumma ya mawlana anta as-salaam wa minka as-salaam wa ilayka yarju' as-salaam. Hayyina rabbana bi's-salaam wa adhkilna dar-as-salaam. Tabarakta wa ta'alaita ya dhu'l jalaali w'al ikram.

Oh Allah, oh our Lord, you are peace, and from you is peace, and to you returns peace. Oh our sustainer, enliven us in peace and enter us into the home of peace. Blessed are you, and the Most High are you, O possessor of majesty and reverence.

This supplication is part of our set prayer, the Du'a, which we recite daily. I think I was told once that it was a prayer that the Prophet used to recite. Although I don't know that for sure something in me likes that idea - that we are praying to Allah using words that have been passed down to us through generations from the Prophet himself.

Growing up, I learned the Du'a by rote, and its translation by rote, and it was something that we just had to do. I don't remember much emotional engagement with it. I had huge emotional engagement with the ginans, our devotional poems, but almost none with the Du'a. That changed a little when I started to learn Arabic and gained a much deeper sense of the connotations of the words and the structure of each section. But it really changed during a time of desperation when it felt like surrendering to God was the only thing I could do. Nothing else made sense anymore. I'd been an educator within the Ismaili community for a few years by then and was fairly knowledgeable, in an intellectual sense, but my engagement with faith had been almost entirely intellectual. I hadn't really prayed except on rare occasions. Looking back, I believed in God, as a "ground of being" type God, the force that integrated, that made all things one, that I dimly sensed sometimes. But did I believe in a God that I had a personal relationship with, that I could pray to? I don't know that I did.

It wasn't a dramatic shift, not really. It's been more like a slow dawning, a gradual deepening of relationship. But there has been a change from a distant God out there to a much deeper sense of being in relationship. And it was this passage from the Du'a that I really connected with during the early period of that relationship. Somehow, and to this day I still can't explain how, I had a felt sense of a peace that was somehow beyond all my turbulence and despair and rage and could hold all of those things, and that I desperately needed. I prayed this passage in desperate need, crying out for peace for myself, for respite. I had no thought for others, then. Later, I prayed it in gratitude, for the gift of that peace that I could sometimes touch. Still later, I prayed it for myself and others, for a world that seemed to be in the same desperate need that I felt. Sometimes, when I remember during a period of turbulence, I still pray this passage, on its own. Often it's still the passage that opens my heart when I recite the Du'a.

The text hasn't changed. It's the same text, and a relatively simple one at that. And in a way my belief in God hasn't changed - I still think of God primarily as a "ground of being" beyond anything I can really explain or put words to. But my relationship to God, and to this text, has changed. It now speaks something of my trust in a divine Presence that embodies peace, with which I can somehow be in relationship, that takes me beyond my small-mind stuff.

If there's a moral to this story, it's that we should be wary of fixing interpretations of religious texts. The reading of a text depends on what we bring to it - our history, personal and political, our prior beliefs and world-view, our being in that moment. Our relationships with sacred texts change as we do, and that's part of the beauty of it.

Interlude - what to say to someone with an "invisible illness"

The vestibular disorder I thought I had 99% recovered from way back in 2010 has reared its head again, for no reason I can work out, leaving me wobbly (literally) and unable to move around as much as I would like. I am seeing it as an opportunity to work with some of my persistent habits of mind, in particular self-judgement, a lack of self-compassion, and believing that I have to be perfect to be loved.

I know from having gone through this the first time round that people with invisible illnesses of all kinds, from something relatively innocuous like dizziness and balance problems, as I have, to chronic fatigue, to mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, tend to face a certain amount of ignorance and "but you don't look sick." Many of these conditions, including mine, can be unpredictable, with good days and bad days, and no clear idea of how long recovery might take, or if it's even possible. Which might explain the vast number of "what not to say" lists. On the other side, as a friend or family member of someone struggling with an invisible illness, it's probably pretty hard to know the right thing to do or say, and you might well be scared of saying the wrong thing, not helped by the "what not to say" lists.

So here's an alternative list, inspired by and adapted from the wonderful friends and family that have taken such good care of me over the last couple of weeks.

"Don't worry about pleasing anyone else, do what's best for you. Trust yourself and your body." I only have limited energy, as my body is putting so much into trying to stay balanced. I can push beyond my limits every so often for things that are really important to me but I know I'll get the payback the next day. And it feels selfish to use that limited energy for things that matter to me but aren't really my responsibility, like going to choir rehearsals or doing "fun stuff" instead of work or cleaning the house. But at the same time, those things are what keep me sane when I spend so much of the rest of the time stuck at home feeling slightly rubbish. So it was lovely to hear my sister affirm my choices and remind me that it was okay to choose to put myself first, and not to feel guilty about it.

"When would you like me to come and see you? I'm free on X day. I'll bring groceries/food/anything you need" So many of my friends have offered to come and spend time with me, knowing that I can't get out very much. It's bloody lonely and I'm missing out on so many lovely things I could do if I were more mobile, so the fact that someone cares enough to come over and hang out with me and do little practical things to make my life easier makes me feel very deeply loved.

"What do you need me to do?" Two of my friends, who came over for dinner earlier this week, asked me very openly what practical help I needed. I don't think I'd have got up the courage to ask if they hadn't offered. But I felt cared for enough to ask them to go out for short walks with me if they had the time - I can't go very far by myself and am scared of getting stranded somewhere that's too far for me to get back if I have a dizzy spell. With someone else, I can go a bit further, and that will help my recovery in the long term. It's a tiny thing but it makes such a huge difference and makes it all feel a bit less isolating.

"It's okay that you feel .... (whatever it is)." It's amazing what has shown up emotionally - there's been a lot of fear, and a lot of guilt, and a lot of "is it my fault? Did I cause this to happen?" and a lot of loneliness and fear of isolation. I've cried more this week than I think I have for months. I'm sure that some of my friends who've been on the receiving end of that on the phone have heard some pretty crazy and irrational stuff come out of my mouth. But they've been so kind and accepting and open-hearted. Just allowing those feelings to be there, not judging or trying to explain them away, has been a wonderful gift.

"Sending you hugs." Lots of my friends are a long long way away and I know they want to help but the distance makes that impossible. So it's lovely to get little messages on social media that let me know that they're thinking of me. Being ill and living on my own means I spend a lot of time by myself, which is fine as I'm an introvert but can still get a little wearing eventually, so it's lovely to be reminded that I'm not as alone as I sometimes fear myself to be.

There's a pattern to this, I notice, as I write it - which is that the things I've appreciated have been the practical things, yes, but also those things that have made me feel loved and cared for. It doesn't matter how clumsy the expression of it might be, if there's genuine love there. Being ill sucks, but it has been a wonderful opportunity to recognise how loving, caring and generous others can be, and to feel a very deep gratitude for that.