2023; a baptism of fire.

It’s the first day of 2024 and I have arrived exhausted.

My final week of 2023 was eventful with some emotional family stuff, three weddings photographed and an attempt to go out and party in the New Year that saw me leave at 10.30pm because my body just wanted a hot water bottle and a cup of tea. I feel like this is an indication of some maturity or at least no longer making poor choices for myself.

My body is exhausted. I woke up late for our group sea swim this morning but I was filled with gratitude to see my friends waiting for me on the beach. That first swim of the year was nothing but joy and a much needed reset from the stress of the last week. Afterwards we all bundled into a coffee shop and shared our festive adventures as we chatted about entering 2024. These moments with people I now call friends is exactly what I am calling in for this year.

2023 was a baptism of fire. It’s kind of hard for me to process or reflect on because there was so much. It felt like the last 5yrs all led up to this year. From leaving my ex and being homeless to finally starting to heal and get to know myself.

I entered 2023 on a path of self destruction. In deep burn out and total disconnect. I was seeing someone who I then discovered was in a long term relationship and once again I had managed to project a fantasy on to an unavailable person. I was not ok.

We were also in the build up to SNAP, our first big conference for photographers and I was facing a £30k loss whether we went ahead or cancelled. Misogyny & patriarchy was raising it’s ugly head in my industry and I once again faced being vilified for calling shit out as well as being used and tokenised.

I had a mental breakdown at another industry conference and everything was dark. I had lost my way. Again.

I had built all this ‘success’ and now I wanted to burn it down because none of it fit anymore. It never had, I had always been trying to make myself fit. After my Autism diagnosis in 2022 I was finally cottoning on that I could not continue to exist this way. What was I trying to prove? That I was ‘normal’ Who was I hoping was going to validate me? The people who were happy to take from me but give nothing back? It was all fake and I needed to strip it all back. The skin I was wearing felt like sandpaper.

I started to see that my current therapist was not helping me anymore. She had helped me realise my patterns but because I could not access the feeling or the emotions to process they kept being played out. I started to learn about somatic therapy and I found a somatic coach to help me.

I also begged my accountant to help me get back under the VAT threshold so I could scale back my businesses. I needed to slow down, otherwise I was going to disappear, I wanted to disappear.

We pushed through for SNAP. Rosie my business partner got sick and needed surgery which was scary and my Grandma also got really sick and we thought she was going to die at one point. Looking back I actually have no idea how we pulled SNAP off.

I still lost a huge amount of money, I could have bought a house, maybe that was the smart choice but I never said I was smart.

And looking back I am so happy I am not smart. That few days in the Peak District with a very special group of people was the turning point of my year and probably my life. For the first time I witnessed authentic connection in a large community setting. And somehow me and Rosie had made that happen.

On the final morning I gave my talk, a poorly put together talk mind you but it had all of my heart in it. Seeing all those people who believed in us and what we are trying to do sitting in front of me, crying, happy tears, gave me permission to cry openly for the first time in years and know that I was no longer alone.

Those few days were nothing but joyful, totally exhausting but joyful. My two year fight to get there had been won, my day three with SNAP had arrived and we half sold out for 2024 in just a week afterwards.

I couldn’t stop crying for about a week after SNAP, the relief, the exhaustion and the deep connection broke down a lot of my walls. I immediately got sick but managed to mostly recover in time to walk the West Highland Way in May. I am a deep lover of walking, especially long walks. I had completed the South West Coast Path in 2020 and was very ready for my next adventure.

This time was different though. I really took that 100miles gently. I wasn’t trying to prove anything, I only wanted to be in nature and completely present. I had also in the aftermath of SNAP realised that I needed to let go of a lot, I needed to remove a lot of people from my life and this walk was a ritual into the next chapter of my 2023. I also used it as the foundation to quit smoking again.

Who wants to be in the beautiful Highlands smoking??? It worked and I haven’t touched one since and doubt I will again. If I close my eyes now, I can take myself back to Loch Lomond and it’s magical shores. That week of walking was just magical. I had started the process of deconstruction and rebirth.

None of this is going to be a linear recalling, so many things were happening alongside one another in 2023. Just before SNAP I made a decision to try more things in Folkestone. Just through attending the Take Up Space festival for International Women’s Day I discovered the Folkestone Bookshop, this incredible space filled with wonderful books and through them I found myself at a writing group on Sunday’s.

That little series of events bought some of the most amazing humans into my life. Suddenly I had a community around me that was nothing to do with work. We had fires on the beach alongside the moon cycles, we watched meteor showers and swam in the sea at night. We went for long walks together and shared many many coffees. We have danced together, shared joy and also witnessed our transformations throughout the last 8 months and it has softened my edges and again reinforced the message…

You are not alone.

I could not be more grateful.

After Scotland, I had my birthday and also my first psychedelic experience with mushrooms. This was a profound experience. A deeply intense processing of trauma. I am going to write about this separately one day but combined with SNAP and another big walk this was probably the moment things really started to shift. I don’t want to use the word awakening, it’s more of a returning to Self. Stripping back and shedding all of the unnecessary masks I have built up. That shift in May was the beginning of really letting go.

Transformation is not an easy process. I realised that The Woman & The Wolf needed to go, that photography was what I did, a medium that I used, not who I was. It was deeply uncomfortable because my masks had given me security. Removing them and speaking and being my truth meant that people, clients, opportunities and old patterns of behaviour fell away, not always with ease.

But this cleared space. I wasn’t overworking myself anymore, I wasn’t saying yes to things that did not align, I had time and space to get to know myself probably for the first time in my life.

With no cognitive decision making I started a process of getting into my body. I started going to yoga 4-5 times a week, I swam in the sea nearly everyday, I was writing a lot and reading a lot. I started to eat better purely because I was craving nourishment, I slowed down, started using film to photograph nature, I journaled frequently again after a year of nothing, I stopped drinking and learned to dance without being drunk. I became a better friend, I had more capacity to care and stopped self abandoning.

Don’t get me wrong it’s not been perfect. I have had chronic pain over the last year, I keep getting sick and my body hurts almost everyday. The fatigue has also been hard. Covid, burn out and suddenly returning to my feeling body has been nothing short of shocking. I find it hard to believe that I ran a marathon in 2022.

I am still struggling with it and need to go through the process of doctors to find out what is going on, navigating the medical system has always been a struggle for me. So I don’t know what the future holds in regards to that but this pain has made me appreciate my body so much more. I just want to care for it and love it. This pain is just my bodies way of communicating, of saying it needs us to slow down, that life is not meant to be like this.

I wholeheartedly believe in the power of embodiment work and somatic therapies. I know that when I spend more time in nature, when I move slowly through life, when I don’t overwork myself, when I don’t spend time on my phone, when I swim, when I use the embodiment tools I have accumulated in the last 8 months to regulate, my pain eases.

So in that sense my pain has been an awakening. Like my body has been on fire, cleansing away the masks.

I also started to engage with Tarot this year, working with the cards feels like a new way to get to know myself. It’s uncanny how they are never wrong. I have been governed by the swords, the hanged man and the death card this past 12 months. They are constantly reminding me that I am in a state of change, that change requires rest, that there must be pauses between the cycle of death and rebirth as we see in the cycles of nature.

In September I went on my first yoga retreat in France. I left my phone in a draw and fully embraced the embodiment practises that were offered to us. I connected with both myself and others in the most beautiful way. I claimed my body back and suffered no pain in those few days. A reminder that the world is constantly making us tense, that we have to find ways to relax as much as we can so we can process, integrate and heal.

For a while I felt in balance. And then the world was set on fire. It’s been burning for a while but this time none of us can ignore it. We have been live streamed the genocide of the Palestinian people for nearly 3 months. Collective and community care has never been more needed, inaction hurts all of us. I realised that if I wanted to turn away I would have to shut off the humanity I have worked so hard to reclaim.

The biggest lesson of 2023 for me was that the whole point of healing our trauma is so we can be fully connected and have capacity for everything. It’s so we can experience all of our joys and all of our pain. It’s so we can be in community, so we can love in action because love is a verb. Real community, real love will scream with fury when harm and injustice occurs. Inaction is impossible, I do not want to live in a world where this happens to anyone and so going into 2024, we fight, we do our small part and we hope for better.

The last quarter of 2023 saw me start a new journey, a new chapter. I started my work and learning to become a trauma informed somatic counsellor. I realised over the summer that while photography will always be one way of working, for me this has always been what I have meant to do.

I tried to do psychology after school but my autism made the education system impossible for me. Maybe it’s because of my own complex childhood trauma and the adversity I have had to fight my through that I find myself here. Alchemising my own experiences to hopefully contribute to something better for other people.

When I stumbled across this course by accident it was a whole body YES reaction.

It has not been easy. Making the time to learn about all of this and how trauma impacts us as individuals and as a collective is hard, it’s all incredibly confronting but also giving me a lot of answers. Who knows who I will be by the time I get to 2025. Because that’s the other lesson; we are constantly evolving, as each year goes by I hope I am different, I hope I don’t reach any destination, I hope I change.

I could write a book about 2023, each month a new chapter, a new stage of my shedding of masks but I want to bring this to a close by focusing on 2024.

An 8 year according to numerology, a year of strength and action. Apparently things are going to feel different this year after the last few years. Perhaps we can hope?

I know for me at this moment in time I am moving slowly. We are in the depths of winter right now, this is the time to pause, to reflect and to rest. Spring will come soon enough. January will be spent quietly. Lots of swimming, lots of stretching and eating good food. Somewhere in there I will be taking small actions, laying the groundwork and thinking about where I want to place my energy this year.

I am also preparing for a big change, I am moving. Still in Folkestone, of course but to a new flat. So right now I am grieving and letting go of a home that for the first time in my life has been safe. The gift of that safety has helped me thrive in so many ways.

Gratitude, excitement and sadness all live in me at the moment.

I think the continued focus on my health as well as my learning will be a priority in 2024 but also SNAP. Running this community and business with Rosie has challenged me deeply and it more often than not feels scary. We have a vision though and while we navigate the ups and the downs, that is starting to come together. I want to give it my all this year and we can’t wait to host Big SNAP in April.

I am also prioritising joy. That exists in the small places. Like this morning where our Thursday morning group of sea swimmers swam under the sunrise and the waning moon. As I floated in the freezing water, feeling everything, I looked at the ethereal sky and thought ‘this is joy, this is magic and I get to be here’

So more magic please, 2023 helped me to believe in it again and I won’t be letting it go. I won’t let it be taken away again.