But writing about mental illness brought her into my life and the years we spent in close contact are a gift I will cherish for the rest of my days.

I ask myself, “What would Elsie want me to do?” The answer has been: “Write.”

The intermission between these two acts may have seen the entire theatre burn down, but we play on regardless.

And soon, I will write not just for her, but about her.

She deserves an entire library.

Listening to my body

Until two years ago, I believed my intuition resided in my spirit alone. I read “mind, body, spirit” as a list of disconnected entities I possessed – all important in their own right, but to be dealt with separately or sequentially.

As a trauma survivor, my body felt like my betrayer.

So much of my wounding had entered me through my body and she often reacted to the echoes of trauma in ways that were disruptive and inconvenient to my plans. Especially when those plans took place in the summer.

But after years of embodiment work, I now know she’s the one with the wisdom.

When I speak of “we”, “our” and “us”, I mean my body and me. Before I went to residential trauma treatment in 2018, we were completely disconnected.

“You could cut off my head, put it on another body and it would make no difference,” I described us to a therapist. If pressed, I would have likely defined her in more sinister terms – I thought of my body as parasitic.

Today, we are in a mutually symbiotic relationship, living life in tandem.

So how did we get here?

First, EMDR

Nearly a decade ago in London, after the usual NHS waiting list hell, I received my official diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

I was enrolled in a treatment plan that included EMDR (eye movement desensitisation reprocessing). However, my masking coping mechanism had disguised the severity of my symptoms during the diagnostic consultation. My nervous system was shot, my window of tolerance was extremely small, and triggers would constantly upend me.

Four months into treatment, I was raped again, further compounding my PTSD. I ended up spending nine months in the safety phase alone before we began EMDR.

EMDR was the first miracle I experienced in years of trying to recover.

I would recall specific incidences of trauma, while my therapist moved her fingers back and forth quickly as I followed them with my eyes. As rapid eye movement took over, I could speak more deeply about the events without going into distress, and the intensity of the memories was reduced.

In only a few sessions, I felt hope for a future free of the shackles of debilitating symptoms.

While my screaming nightmares, vomiting panic attacks and daily flashbacks had disappeared, I was still mostly dissociated from my body – she was an alien to me. At the time, I didn’t know that my chronic spinal pain, which originated from congenital disc fusions resulting in arthritis, was being compounded by my PTSD.

Fear and pain run along the same neural pathways, and I was always in fear; hence, I was always in pain.

Checking out from my body was the way I’d survived.

Second, Breathwork

In 2018, in the desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico I spent 28 days at the Life Healing Center (a casualty of the pandemic - it no longer exists). In individual and group sessions, I was treated with somatic experiencing, acupuncture, trauma-informed bodywork, breathwork and art therapy.

Discovering breathwork was the key to the first of many locks on my body’s doors. With the guidance of my therapist Juli, I’d spend an hour using my breath to move emotions and memories through my body.

I had been sober for over five years at this point, and breathwork created a natural high that provided calmness and clarity. I felt my head and body start to shift into alignment – still a couple of feet apart, but an improvement upon the previous miles.

I had been under psychiatric or therapeutic care since I was 14 years old, and none of it truly began to connect me with my body until this work at the age of 33.

PTSD had inhibited my ability to work full-time for years, and the cost of this treatment had made it inaccessible. My health insurance paid for some of my treatment, but I had to crowdfund the remainder from friends and family, to whom I remain forever grateful.

It is abhorrent to me that the right to life is reserved for those who can afford it.

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Third, Traditional Chinese Medicine

Those integrative modalities all started me back on the journey to myself. And in doing so, the medication regime I was on became both redundant and harmful.

I had been medicated in one form or another since I was 14 and had become medication-resistant. With the support of my psychiatric professionals, I spent two and a half years slowly coming off my meds and in May 2020, amid the height of the pandemic, I returned to baseline.

On medication and off, I had experienced episodes of psychosis that I now consider to be deep spiritual experiences. After watching Crazywise, a documentary exploring Indigenous cultures’ views of what the modern world calls “mental illness”, I was even more determined to find alternatives to medication.

But my brain and body didn’t know how to cope with medication or without, and every day was torture.

Minus the bloating caused by anti-psychotics plus the impact of withdrawal on my body, I dropped down to a fragile 120 lbs (for context, I’m 5’8”). I continued twice-weekly talk therapy due to the generosity and caring of my psychologist. While I was unmedicated, it’s important to note I was not untreated.

However, I needed more support.

That support came through the hands and knowledge of Dr Reginald Cann, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor who is legend in Bermuda for his healing abilities. Through supplements, acupuncture, and energy work, Sifu Cann has completely altered the way my body functions. I now use both Eastern and modern medicine for all my ailments and I understand they are not either mental or physical, but always both.

Finally, Dancing With My Pain

These modalities, as I was practicing them, required another person and constant expenditure. Then, in 2023, I was introduced to Ishtara, a moving meditation and somatic healing technique, by my friend Amy Jubb as she completed her teacher training.

Ishtara smashed open the last lock on the door between my mind and body.

Through dancing with my feelings, I began to understand that my body had been constantly speaking, but her language was foreign to me. Trauma had separated me from my mother tongue at too young an age to recall its meaning. My Ishtara practice gave me the Rosetta Stone to translate the messages she sends me.

It was not, however, all the dance party with myself I’d envisioned it would be. I experienced epic emotional ruptures when I started moving in, and into, my body.

Dr Hillary McBride, author of The Wisdom of Your Body, explained on a podcast, when you start to engage with your body again, “you touch what you felt right before you shut down.”

I left my body in childhood, in the midst of fear, panic, searing physical pain, and sexual violation. I came back right where we’d left off.

Both Amy and Ishtara’s founder Tracy held space for me and my nervous system in the months it took me to adjust. When I finally did, I learned to love the dance of rupture and rapture.

I now have a practice I can do alone, or in community, where whatever I’m feeling has the space to move through me, changing me as it does, taking me deeper and deeper into the truth of myself.

Freeing up on my wedding day, 6 months after I started Ishtara.

How listening to my body led me out of depression

I used to hold a deep loathing for the saying “It’s always darkest before the dawn”. It was not what I wanted to hear when the dark night of my soul was one without end. What I’ve since learned is that the change doesn’t happen just because of the darkness; it happens when I fully surrender to it.

By writing, sharing and claiming how much it was consuming me, I accepted where I was.

And then, I asked my pain to dance.

Beyond being able to hear my body’s messages, Ishtara has allowed me to fully embody the most agonising parts of my experiences. I then not only survive them but alchemise them into hope, love, and power.

When we lost Alora, my body wanted us to grieve her fully, but my mind was concerned about our financial survival. Pregnancy loss is catastrophic, but capitalism comes calling for mothers whose babies have died inside them.

The bills were mounting, but the more I pressed myself to get better, the worse my postpartum depression became. My mind was impatient for the process to end, but my body needed us to keep grieving.

We had carried my daughter so beautifully together, sustaining her in our waters with love. After my surgery, Alora’s remains were sent away for testing and a month later we discovered she’d had a chromosomal disorder - Turner Syndrome - and had developed as far as she could. My body held her so well that there were no external signs that she had died until a routine ultrasound revealed a missing heartbeat in place of the bright flicker we had seen before. I was in shock, and angry that my body had lied to me.

Except she hadn’t.

For the first time in many moons, a panic attack woke me out of my sleep the night before the appointment that dashed my dreams. Alora was the perfect size for her foetal development date, meaning her heart had stopped only hours before the ultrasound.

My body had told the truth. It was my mind that needed time to catch up.

These constant conflicts between myself and my body led to suicidal ideation and my husband spent most of the summer on watch.

Four months after losing my daughter, I woke up more desperate. I’d had a colonoscopy and biopsy and had stitches where the sun truly does not shine. I have been clean and sober for over 12 years and had managed to avoid general anaesthetic until the last year. Two cycles of IVF, two resulting D&Cs and the colonoscopy had seen me under sedation five separate times, and I was feeling hopeless.

I used to imagine I’d welcome these brain breaks, but I am now so in tune with myself that I cannot tolerate the fracturing of mind, body and spirit that occurs.

That morning, I learned that a sweat lodge was taking place at Spirit House. In spite of the intensity of my suicidality - or likely because of it - I felt called to attend. Building the lodge with old friends and new, and making my prayer ties, prepared me for what was to come.

The next day, under the stewardship of Lakota Wisdom Keeper Kari Black Elk, I experienced my first sweat.

As we prepared to enter the lodge, Kari told us:

“It will be very dark in there. The darkness is not frightening. We consider it the same as the day.”

“The darkness has a purpose. It is there to remind you that you are the light.”

While a heat more intense than I’d ever experienced permeated all my cells, I tapped into the discoveries of my Ishtara practice. I dove into the underworld of my experience, welcoming every uncomfortable sensation.

Combining these two practices of complete surrender triggered a cascade of healing for me.

I had spent the summer living a nightmare, feeling deeply alone and abandoned after losing my daughter, and scared of my own mind. My deepest fears had come to life, and I held them with open arms. I listened intently to the pain and where it was guiding me and I finally heard my body’s cries of mourning. The learnings from the sweat lodge rang true for me – that only by venturing deep into the dark can we see our own light.

I didn’t need to be rescued from my sadness, I needed to feel it.

Two weeks later, the clocks changed. I’d lost my daughter during the summer solstice; on the same day we’d married one year before, and summer was finally over. The relief in my body was palpable. The darkness of the night came earlier, and I embraced the blackened skies.

They accentuated my light.

My mother birthed me, but all being right in the order of things, I will outlive her. While my spirit is always held by the Ancestors, my own is the only body who will be with me from my first breath to my last.

She knows me best and I trust her wisdom to carry us through.

A healing note

There is one more modality I started last year that, in tandem with my movement practice and talk therapy, has altered my brain-body connection and created new neural pathways. However, it requires the space of its own essay, which is forthcoming. I’ve only briefly touched on the somatic modalities I’ve used in this piece but they have impacted me in profound ways. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to know more about any one of them in particular.

With love.

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The data is clear; when we ‘Spring forward’ rates of car accidents, suicides, heart attacks and strokes increase. This disruption may only affect others for a few weeks, but for me and my mood disorder friends, the physical and mental effects don’t shift from us until we ‘Fall back’.

I must be wary of mania in those first few weeks of springtime. I was distracted by wedding planning last year, and I spent months before, and the big day itself, in a hypomanic episode. It did enable me to assemble an epic five-day celebration without collapsing, and our spontaneous honeymoon staved off my inevitable crash, but most summers I’m not so fortunate.

Yes, I know, I know, time is a construct. But so is our entire society and we still have to live in it. One year, I tried to act as if the time didn’t change, but found it was impossible unless I became a complete recluse.

To be fair, that is how I spent most of the pandemic. During that seeming end of days, I came to call myself “The Hermit of Bailey’s Bay”. I’d watch the ocean crash against Bay Island from my window thinking that with all the iguana-resembling rock has seen over millennia, this was a minor blip. For me, the experience of spotting the first cruise ship on Bermuda’s North Shore after 18 months of empty ocean came as a surprise – this relic from a faraway past drifted by as if in a dream.

Truthfully, I’ve never returned to my pre-pandemic level of socialising. This may be because I started dating my now-husband (a father to two sons) in January 2020 and my life has changed so much since. I am rarely alone these days, which is hard for someone who requires solitude to restore myself. I can’t as easily crash into a non-verbal, hidey hole for hours after I’ve been peopling out in the streets. Healthy partnerships require communication and connection (blahdy blah blah) and that takes up energy.

Plus, Ajala has an irritating tendency to talk through every minute of a movie. There is so much pausing and shushing by me that there is no chill in our Netflix (my first bout with Covid stole some of my hearing which also doesn’t help). He’s the cinema chatterbox my sister Nadia and I would silently judge with only a glance. Except, dear reader, I married him. And thus, the added cacophony from the outside world can drain me if I don’t claim enough silent time on my return.

Like many situations in life and trauma, I can’t completely blame my summer seasonal affective depression on saving daylight.

I wasn’t always like this.

I was born in the middle of August in Bermuda! I love heat, sunlight, the sticky salt spray, warm pink sand between my toes and plunging into the ocean. In England for our month-long summer visits, Granny Rose would make me the most delicious chocolate hazelnut birthday cake with hints of orange and strawberry jam to devour during my annual pool party. Long summer holidays baking myself browner in the activities of the day delighted me.

So, what changed?

This year, there was no doubt about the root of my despair – experiencing the death of my daughter inside my womb on our first wedding anniversary and the resulting postpartum depression and grief consumed all the light of the summer sun. I have struggled to do much of anything but survive.

Finally, after months of twice-weekly therapy, an intensive treatment regime and total surrender to the latest layer of emotional, mental and physical pain, I have begun to emerge.

Four weeks ago, I went out alone for the first time and managed to both enjoy myself and avoid a panic attack. For most of these past few months, within minutes of leaving the house my heart rate accelerated, my breath became sparse, and perspiration formed. In May, I had joked that my husband infected me with his sweating gene when I became pregnant. Suddenly, there was no more joking or laughter or much of anything at all but tears and pain.

It makes sense. My body knew more deeply than my mind wanted to admit; we were post-partum – albeit without a baby – and should be cozied up, healing wounds, breathing through grief and giving ourselves time to catch up to the shock of it all. My mind kept saying “If I could just…” (insert next mini-hurdle) then I could prove I’d be okay. My body knew better. And now I can see it took another full trimester for us to step out into the sunshine again.

But what about the summers before?

Is it that bipolar disorder tends to begin surfacing during teenage years?

Or was it that I was raped a day before my 16^th birthday?

Were my glowing memories further soiled by an accidental teen pregnancy the summer of my gap year? With no money or health insurance coverage to navigate Bermuda’s expensive, confusing and restrictive abortion process I worriedly watched the weeks tick by until I could gather enough funds to fly to Planned Parenthood in New York City. (The irony that I had to flee to a country steeped in the battleground of maternal health and fertility is not lost on me).

The trauma of that experience – knowing how deeply I wanted to be a mother one day; while also knowing how completely unwell, young and lacking qualifications I was at the time – haunted me for years. Yet, that procedure also gave me a chance to get well, earn a tertiary education and stay alive long enough to want to start a family today.

Could it be because my dad died in July, three weeks before I turned 25? Wearing black as we walked to his grave in the high heat of the midday sun, my friend (and later our wedding singer) Mia Chambray sang his favourite song Ave Maria acapella. She learned it within five days and her beautiful voice reverberated through the graveyard, bouncing off the headstones as the pallbearers struggled to lower him with sweaty hands slipping on rope. That quarter-century was so painful to celebrate as I drowned in grief; just as this past August’s milestone fortieth was one of wishing to be dead with my daughter instead of alive, alone, without her.

Chair dancing with a bad back during my birthday serenade. We cried sharing memories of each other, but they brought me my first joy after Alora’s death. Video by Dion the Creative.

Before we were married or even engaged, in the highest heat of our second pandemic summer and a week after my birthday, I discovered my husband’s year-long secret relapse. The pain of betrayal annihilated me and further forged sadness into my body. To his credit, a year later he rewrote the story of my birthday, proposing to me at home with a handwritten letter, surrounded by photos and belongings of our Ancestors, including my dad’s glasses, calling them in to bless us.

We married during the summer solstice and while I began to love summer again, my body did not catch up to these newly told tales. She keeps the score, the record, the archive, she keeps it all - a museum of losses and violations and death.

Every spring, when we turn the clocks, she braces for what is to come. I soothe her with my words, convince her there’s nothing to fear, but inevitably we walk together through this life. She and I both lost Alora. We both grieved her in our own way – sometimes in sync, often at odds, but she’s the one who’s always right about the how and the when. We’re on her time.

She speaks her own language, and I’m learning to listen. It hasn’t always been easy, but it has always been true. And I’ll be sharing just how I’ve discovered the Rosetta Stone I need to translate her messages to me in part two.

Coming soon.

Sunday morning on the altar of surrender

“I’m not okay.” The words came out of me like a whisper. Without poetry. Without explanation.

“I know,” my husband replied, sitting down next to me. The sofa cushion has a permanent indent that marks my search for solace.

I wept, recognising I have no fight left in me. For the past 19 years, whenever I’ve felt like giving up, when I’m certain I can’t endure any more pain, when I know I’m at the end of the road, I’ve fought that little bit harder. Picked up another tool. Acted my way into a better place. Taken the first micro-step. Done the next right thing. Currently, nothing I do seems to shift this desire to die that has been consuming me, with various intervals of respite, since childhood.

I had a call with a therapist recently to discuss a round of EMDR, a treatment I’d found effective in addressing trauma back in 2015. She looked at me with the kindest eyes, asking if that was what I really wanted to do because, in all honesty, I looked exhausted.

“I am so tired.”

She nodded. I cried. We both agreed it wasn’t the right time for me to embark on any more “work”.

No more work. No more masking. No more action. No more guilting myself that I’m not doing enough to beat the beast.

All I can do is surrender.

And that is the opposite of giving up.

When miracles don’t feel miraculous

Statistically, a person dies by suicide every 40 seconds somewhere in the world. Who that is likely to be – in terms of gender, income, trauma, illness, experience, background, etc. – varies depending on the country. However, according to the World Health Organisation, “by far the strongest risk factor for suicide is a previous suicide attempt.”

My second, and last, suicide attempt was on a Sunday in June 2005. I was 20 years old. A law school student baby. In an alternate reality, I died that summer and never graduated or reached the milestone of 21. In this reality, that was the expected outcome – an eventuality my family were told to prepare for. I woke up in the now-defunct Middlesex Hospital in London to medical staff asking me what day it was. I thought of movies where the concussed athlete is asked a simple question, and his correct answer indicated good health and inspired relief. Unbearable fear devoured me as I grasped onto fragments of time in my mind. I didn’t have an answer and took a desperate guess.

“Tuesday?”

It was Thursday. The sinking in my stomach was swiftly replaced by searing pain and further conversation was interrupted by black blood emerging from my mouth. I was yellow with jaundice due to my failing liver. My kidneys had waved the white flag. No transplant listing for this self-destruction risk. My time was up.

Except it wasn’t. I prayed for the first time in my entire life to a God I didn’t believe in. I promised I wouldn’t waste anymore of my life being depressed. I would be happy, if only my life would be spared.

And it was. It took nearly nine years until my liver function tested in normal range, and my kidneys needed another three, but I survived.

But I wasn’t happy. At least not most of the time. Because living with mental illness and trauma and addiction I hadn’t yet recognised is more complex than that. I had made a promise I simply couldn’t keep.

I have, however, managed to not take my own life every day since then – even on the days that death is calling its siren song.

I often wonder, ‘How?’

Cracking the mask

Yes, nearly dying was a wake-up call. But honestly, I’ve felt as desperate many times since then. Truthfully, I’ve felt that desperate too many times in the last two months. Surviving through this summer where pregnancy loss grief, postpartum depression and trauma have all collided has been a miracle. Being alive to experience the unbearable Bermuda heat transition this week has been a miracle. Hitting the age of 40 in August was a miracle, despite being an unwelcome one.

These last two months have held no shining bright light, nor booming voice of God, nor celebratory relief.

There has simply been the continuation of my breath, in and out, a wish and a prayer; and using that breath to speak the desperation I feel.

Last month, when Ajala asked if I had ever told anyone my plans before my two suicide attempts, I answered no.

I can feel immense shame over sharing how terrible I feel. We were all told the story of the little boy who cried wolf and whose sheep all died as a result. I don’t want the sheep to die. And the incongruence of suicidality is that I don’t want myself to die either. My husband’s question reminded me that, by refusing to stay silent about my pain, I have been saving my life for nearly two decades. In 40-second increments.

There’s an article by Rachel E. Moss that Google tells me I “visit often”. It’s called Dear Suicidal Friend. Reading it is both a sign that I am not doing well and a sign that I am. Because I’m choosing to be reminded to stay alive. Having lost her husband to suicide, she writes so knowingly about the thoughts that exist inside me. The thoughts that exist inside all of us who struggle to choose life every day. If you’re a member of this forsaken family, I hope it helps you too.

Because, frankly, the help we need often doesn’t come. Like me, you may feel like you’re calling in the dark and the only voice that answers is your own echo. Accessing help, especially when you’ve already trodden down well-worn avenues, is far more exhausting than it should be for people who are using all their energy to simply keep breathing.

But using that breath to say how I feel, to unmask for no reward other than knowing I’ve bought myself forty more seconds, is often the bravest thing I can do.

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I post this essay in recognition of Suicide Prevention Month. While I haven’t been able to write much (as explained in my note) I’m risking some tapping on my laptop, because it’s how I heal (my soul, at least - my hand may disagree).

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My plot frequently collapses due to debilitating depression, a manic episode, a trauma flashback, an episode of psychosis, ADHD hyper-fixation or paralysis, autistic sensory processing overwhelm, chronic pain or some other variation of mental and physical torture. The main character stops moving forward. The hero’s journey never quite completes. This writer never finishes her book… and cancels her publishing deal.

Then after I wrote this essay and prepared to post, my baby died inside me and I spent my first wedding anniversary in the hospital. Life not only paused, it came to a standstill. I am grief-stricken – stuck in time and space, unwillingly thrust into an alternate timeline where I no longer have a longed-for daughter due on the first of January. Where instead I wail, holding a gifted onesie tight to my chest knowing I can’t bring her back. Where I shelter safely at home in my cave.

We are now in July, where it’s high summertime, the living truly ain’t easy and May is long over. But I’m alive so far beyond my expiration date that each day is still one to marvel at. And frankly, I could either wait until next May or “write my way through this”, as my ever-patient memoir editor, Kristen McGuinness, always reminds me is possible.

Why “Cave Conversations”?

I described a recent bout of severe depression as if I were lost in an underwater cave, and no one knew how to find me. Alone in the depths, I screamed into the void. Only bubbles emerged. In reality, I was silently battling through the fallout of my first miscarriage after a brutal start to IVF, during a time that should have been reserved for newlywed bliss. I’m now physically recovering from my second miscarriage in the space of nine months. My silence has been deafening and destroying me.

Photo by Nicola Muirhead

When depression began to claim me in my early teens, I would close my bedroom curtains and stare silently at the walls. After a suicide attempt, I spent my last year of sixth form living at home in the English countryside instead of at my boarding school, showing up once a week for assignments. My mother would call me “Bin Laden” as the hunt for the world’s most wanted man raged on in the Tora Bora Mountains - the “Black Cave” in English. (As an aside, white schoolkids would yell “Osama!” at me on the street. In their eyes, a multiracial Afro-Caribbean, Iban-Malaysian, and Scottish girl with Portuguese and Indigenous South American ancestry clearly resembled a bearded Afghani man).

For many years, I associated caves with depression and darkness – dank, damp, lifeless places that sucked me in and kept me captive. I now realise that the cave is where I retreat to find the safety, solace and strength to return to the world.  

This has been the significance of caves in human history.

They’re where we go for shelter and survival – whether alone or in community. We light fires to keep warm and we welcome our allies inside.

I was born and grew up in Bermuda, an island riddled with caves perfect for childhood exploration. Some gloriously shimmer with crystalline stalagmites and stalactites; others hold cold, still, turquoise water - the perfect respite from the oppressive heat and humidity of an island summer. My beloved Fraggle Rock (yes, elder millennial over here!) was co-created by Bermudian Michael Frith alongside Jim Henson and is based on our infamous Crystal Caves.

Depression stole my love of caves; I now claim them back.

Here at Cave Conversations, I’ll be going beneath the surface and writing about all the things that scare us and shame us, because I know that sharing sets us free. At least it has me. I started with blogging, then “outing” myself with mental illness in a Bermuda national newspaper, and eventually appearing on BBC Breakfast and BBC World News to advocate for those of us surviving on the margins.

I’ve spent years in recovery and healing from the effects of mental illness, alcoholism and addiction, intergenerational and personal trauma, racism, and gender discrimination. I want to share what heals me with you. I’m a multidisciplinary storyteller and I intend to write, sculpt, paint and perform my way through this life.

My work here will explore many topics including Black liberation, People of the Global Majority, womanhood, mental health, art, writing, chronic illness and pain, neurodivergence, addiction and recovery, poetry, fertility, family matters, grief, racism, ancestry, spirituality, embodiment practices, Bermuda, Borneo, and Britain, and surviving childhood sexual abuse. I am pro-Black, pro-2SLGBTQIA+, pro-resistance, and anti-imperialist. I do what I say on the tin.

Anais Nin wrote, “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”

I can only fully catch my breath at depth. Come on in with me.

The water’s fine and the cave is safe.

Photos by Nicola Muirhead