Enter the Cave

Starting the conversation.

I had intended to launch Cave Conversations in May during Mental Health Awareness Month, but what I’ve discovered about living with - and sometimes nearly dying from - mental illness is that my plans are constantly subject to change, and life is perpetually put on pause. As Jessica Stern writes in her memoir (and as Bessel Van Der Kolk quotes in The Body Keeps the Score), “That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot…”

This essay is recorded. Press the play button above to listen to the voiceover.

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