A Birthday Review of the Year

Or, what I'm learned in 2024 and what I'm leaving here

Photo by Nick Stephenson on Unsplash

It’s been a while since I published one of these and for that, I’m sorry. 2024 was an intense year. I had big hopes for it - it’s a numerological number 8 (my favourite number because of the shape and it’s relation to the infinity sign), I was moving back to London after a brief and damp detour to the countryside and I had a brand new job. However, as is always the case, some of those hopes flew a little too close to the sun and got very burnt. So, in an effort to get you, and this Substack, back up to date, here is how 2024 went and what I learned from it. Plus, it’s my birthday and the final day of the year, so when better for a review?

January: My most popular post, about whether or not to take Ozempic, was in January. As the content kids say, it did numbers. Loads of you wrote to me or posted in the comments about your own experiences with your body and for that I’m very grateful. If it made you feel a little bit seen then I’m glad, it did the same for me. It also presented me with one of those forks in the road that crop up now and then. That post had done so well that the smart content strategy move would have been to have shifted this Substack to the theme of female bodies, weight and self-esteem. For a while I thought about it but in the end I simply didn’t have the energy to hold that space. I am so thankful for the women who do.

The lesson: Writers have a saying, write from the scar not the wound and this month I chose to practice that and I’m really pleased with the piece (and the peace) which came from it.

February: I moved back to London. I packed up the decrepit house I’d rented in Sussex, borrowed a friend’s flat while I waited for mine to be restored after the flood damage (it’s a long story, catch up here) and gave myself a pat on the back for being able to admit when I’d made a mistake.

The lesson: sometimes you try something and it doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean the next thing won’t, although that might be hard to believe for a while.

March: I was about to start a new job and the renovations on my flat were due to complete by the end of the month. I’ve never employed a builder before so I assumed when I said, “I need to move back in at the end of March”, they would understand that I needed to move back in by the end of March. Of course they didn’t and so I ended up in a flat which still didn’t have floorboards, a kitchen or a fully working toilet. I cried. A lot. I realised how important it is to me to live in a nice space. That’s a very #middleclassproblem but it’s also an acknowledgement of how much stress chaos and peeling paint causes my body. I got ill, couldn’t breath properly, my eczema returned. For the first time ever, I couldn’t deny the correlation between stress and my health.

The lesson: I could have insisted on getting the bathroom finished in the first week. I could have refused to pay until the toilet actually flushed without the use of a bucket. In short I could have stood up for myself more because my body needed me to, instead of just gritting my teeth and pushing on. (This is what the literary analysts call, foreshadowing).

NB: (All of the above makes my builders sound awful, so I should also add that despite this they were some of the loveliest, kindest people I’ve ever worked with. They just couldn’t keep to schedule for love nor money.)

April: New job! And all the same old fears. Am I doing enough? Am I good enough? What do they think of me? What if I get it wrong? What if I fail? It turns out there’s a reason I worked for myself for ten years, it was to avoid the terror that plagues me when I think about letting others down. Did I sit with these fears and try to work through them? Sometimes. Most of the time, I just pushed through.

The lesson: Sometimes we think we’ve healed from a past fear when in fact we’ve just neatly avoided it. I thought I was a bigger, better, wiser person than I had been in my last corporate job but in fact I’d just avoided having to worry about other people’s expectations but refusing to work with anyone! A neat strategy but not exactly a long-term one.

May: One thing about me, I love a course. In May I went on two that really changed me. The first was The Lightning Process - all about controlling your mind to control your energy. It was vital in helping me feel like I might not be a slave to my diabetes for ever and more recently I’ve been using the techniques I learned in it to manage anxiety. Did it cure me? No. But it was a small step in the right direction. The second was a stand-up course. I loved it. If I’m honest I’ve always wanted to be an actor in the West End so trudging up five flights of stairs to a dingy rehearsal room on a Monday night, made me feel like I was in a fringe production of As You Like It. It also gave me the most important lesson for this month:

The lesson: just because someone is leading you somewhere, doesn’t mean you have to go. I am a polite person. If you try to start a conversation with me, most of the time I’ll chat along. If you make a joke, I’ll laugh. If you ask me a question, I’ll do my best to give you an honest answer. What stand-up taught me is that none of that matters. If someone heckles you, you don’t have to engage and you certainly don’t have to be polite back. You can ignore them, you can put them down, you can call them a c*** if you wish. You never have to be polite for the sake of politeness, and it’s liberating.

June: A strange thing happened in June. My brain broke. For the first time in my life I suffered with anxiety. I stopped sleeping and instead just let my brain run loops of conversations I wished I’d had. It wasn’t fun and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I say “for the first time” but what I came to learn is that all that anxiety had been sitting there, just waiting for me to notice it. But I am the queen of avoidance so for 42 years I’d neatly tamped it down and got on with life.

The lesson: Anxiety is not an innate personality trait, it doesn’t exist for some and not for others. It’s there in all of us and if we don’t acknowledge it we’re just postponing it’s inevitable (and more dramatic) entrance. Also, there is nothing like suffering yourself to give you increased empathy for others.

July and August: These two together because the anxiety sort of crushed the summer. Eventually, I had to just accept that my body didn’t want to go out, didn’t want to see people, found everything too stimulating. So there was nothing more I could do than take myself to bed with a good book. I worked and I read. That was it. Reading is probably my first love. As a child, I could spend days curled up in my room just ploughing my way through book after book after book (did I mention my amazing ability to ignore anxiety for 42 years). This created a slightly awkward situation in that I read so much my school and parents assumed I was some sort of child prodigy, instead of just a shy kid with too much time on her hands. Like everyone, the amount I read as an adult has been decimated by social media so over the summer I turned my Instagram off and devoted myself to reading a genre I believe is referred to as “fairy smut” instead. Was it high brow? No. Do I think I grew as a person in anyway during this time? Also, no. Did those books make me laugh, take me away to another world and allow my brain to slow down? Yes.

The lesson: Put your phone down and go back to bed with a book.

September: Ever so slightly less anxious but exhausted because I worked through the summer and didn’t take a proper break. I started part two of my training to be a sex therapist and spent two days in person with all the other wannabe sex therapists, which was both amazing and completely overwhelming. But what it did make me realise was how much I love being surrounded by people who love a good giggle about sex and who are also making big shifts in their lives. When a lot of your friends are very settled, it can sometimes feel like you’re the only one who still has balls up in the air (excuse the pun) so being with other people who had also chosen to start something new was refreshing.

The lesson: If you’ve spent two months in your flat reading about fairies, two days in the company of 23 strangers is going to knock you for six. Book some time off to sleep directly after.

October: In case I hadn’t done enough courses in 2024, I picked one more up. (This recap is making me think my therapist is right, I need to get off the self-improvement train.) It was October so I went all mystical and witchy and started to learn about the Celtic Medicine Wheel. It instantly gifted me with a different perspective on the anxiety. Perhaps my brain wasn’t broken, perhaps it was just trying to tell me I was in a period of rest rather than a period of doing. I’d felt so uncomfortable stopping that even though that was what my body desperately needed, I’d pushed on anyway. I should have stopped when I first moved to the countryside but the house I was moving to was falling down and the landlord didn’t want to do anything about it, so fixing that felt like a priority. I should have rested when I came back to London but I had a flat to fix and a new job to ace and people to see. I should have rested when my brain decided that sleep was terrifying and that every ache in my body was a symptom of some severe illness. But I thought if I stopped I’d never have the energy to start again. So I kept going and it was only in October that I saw how futile that had been. I was trying to run when I could barely crawl, I needed to stop and rest.

The lesson: life goes in cycles. You will need to stop and rest, and once you have done that for a while you can go again. And if you don’t stop willingly, your body will force you to.

November: The happiest month of the year. I led Sovereignty and Seduction with my beautiful friend (and incredible coach), Nikki, and it healed me. For three days I got to be in a beautiful space with incredible women, seeing them overcome fears and blossom. Gay Hendrix writes about the concept of the Zone of Genius - when we are doing things we love and we are good at - this was three days in my Zone of Genius and it was like I’d spent three weeks at the most nurturing spa. My brain got quieter and sleep came more easily.

The lesson: A beautiful way to know when you’re in your Zone of Genius is to look at how much energy it takes versus how much it gives. Running those three days takes a lot of energy but I left with a spring in my step and all excited for the rest of the month. In 2025, I am pruning anything which isn’t in my Zone of Genius from my to-do list.

December: My birthday month, Christmas, my favourite time of the year. And also the month in which I thought I fixed the anxiety once and for all. I saw the goddess that is Annalie Howling for some EMDR and it was as though she simply lifted me off the timeline that made me anxious and put me on a different timeline, a few feet away. Close enough that life was jogging along in the same way but far enough that it felt calmer. The looping thoughts which had plagued me disappeared, sleep returned and, I felt like myself again. I was cured! And then, I wasn’t. The anxiety and insomnia was back. It only took a little trigger but there I was, awake when I should have been asleep, brain going round and round on a loop again. I panicked. Surely I’d fixed this?!

The lesson: There is no “fix”. We are not wholly well or wholly broken but forever somewhere in between. A few days after the anxiety and insomnia had returned, they eased again. I was able to look at the looping thoughts with a little distance and a degree of calm. I had a few days where it felt like I was drowning but then those lessons I’ve learned this year - to rest, to advocate for myself, to show myself some compassion and to remember what I’m good at - kicked in, my head was out of the water and I was swimming for the shore. I wasn’t cured but I was able to reset myself much faster than before.

Overall, I’m better than I was. I sleep, my heart is no longer racing out of my chest each day, I’m able to hear my own thoughts without believing every single one of them. I’m still a bit loopy, but that’s ok. And for 2024, that will do.

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