Still Here My Story

Let me tell you about a boy.

Not a fictional one. Not a composite of other people’s experiences dressed up to make a point. A real boy. A specific one.

Me.

If you have ever felt like your life began at a disadvantage before you even knew what a disadvantage was i think you are going to recognise yourself in this story because that is exactly what happened and I am still every single day finding my way through it.

This is not a story about having arrived.

This is a story about still walking.

I grew up in a home that was not safe.

I want to say that plainly because for most of my life I did not say it plainly. I dressed it up. I minimised it. I became extraordinarily skilled at making other people comfortable with my story by softening the edges and skipping the parts that made people shift in their seats.

But soft edges are not honest and I am done being dishonest about where I came from.

The home I grew up in was shaped by addiction. Not addiction as something that happened in another room, behind a closed door, at a polite distance. Addiction as the atmosphere. As the weather inside the walls. As the thing that determined whether today would be manageable or whether today would be something I would spend the next twenty years trying to process in a therapist’s chair or in my case in the quiet of my own spiritual searching.

My parents own blood carried it and so in some complicated, unfair, never-asked-for way so did I. Not the addiction itself necessarily. But the inheritance of it. The way it shapes a nervous system. The way it teaches a child things about the world that take a lifetime to unteach.

I did not choose that beginning.

Nobody does.

I showed up to school broken.

I want you to understand what that actually means. It does not mean I was visibly falling apart. It does not mean anyone could necessarily see it. In fact and this is the particular cruelty of it I was very good at looking like everything was fine because I had been practising that performance since before I started school.

But underneath it, I was exhausted in a way that sleep did not fix. I was carrying things in my body that bodies are not designed to carry so early. I was trying to sit in a classroom and concentrate on lessons while my mind was doing something far more urgent trying to make sense of a life that did not make sense and the work? I could not keep up with the work.

Not because I wasn’t smart. I know that now. But I did not know it then. Then, I just knew that other kids seemed to get it and I didn’t. That the words on the page blurred. That the instructions didn’t stick. That I would sit in that room feeling increasingly behind and increasingly certain that falling behind meant something about who I was.

It did not. But no one told me that.

Then there was the social side of things.

Making friends.

Which let me just say this with the honesty it deserves was something I genuinely did not know how to do.

Not because I didn’t want connection. I wanted it desperately. But wanting something and knowing how to safely receive it are two entirely different skills and nobody had shown me what safe connection looked like. What I had been shown is that the people closest to you can hurt you without meaning to. Can disappear without warning. Can love you and still leave you in situations no child should be left in.

So I stood at the edges. Of playgrounds. Of classrooms. Of social situations that everyone else seemed to navigate naturally while I watched from a careful, lonely distance and tried to figure out the rules of a game I had never been taught and then the bullying came and with it the particular devastation of having not one safe place. Not home. Not school. Not the hours between. Just an endless rotation of environments where I was learning being taught, really by accumulated experience that the world was not a place that was going to be kind to me.

I absorbed that. Children absorb everything. It goes in and it stays and it builds a story and the story it built in me was one I have spent my entire adult life trying to rewrite.

Then there was death.

Not at a comfortable distance. Not the abstract kind that adults prepare you for with gentle language and age-appropriate books.

I am talking about losing a sibling.

Someone who shared my world from the inside. Who understood without explanation the particular reality of our particular home. Who knew what I knew and felt what I felt and was the one person on earth who did not need a full sentence to understand a half one.

Gone and I was left to grieve that in a household that was already struggling to hold itself together. In a home where grief had nowhere to be expressed safely. In a child’s body that had no framework for what was happening and no one equipped to provide one.

So I carried it alone.

The way I had learned to carry everything.

Quietly. Invisibly. Getting on with it because getting on with it was the only available option.

Family, for me was not a stable unit.

It was something that shifted and changed and broke apart and rearranged in ways that I had no control over and very little understanding of. I know what it is to be separated from the people you love not because of anything you did but because the circumstances of your life made separation inevitable.

I know what it means to grow up without the consistent presence of parents who were fully available not because they were absent in the simple way physically gone but because addiction and struggle occupy a person. They take up the space where presence should be.

I lost a parent while I was still figuring out how to be a child.

Still figuring out who I was. Still needing someone to show me. Still reaching for guidance in a space where guidance was not consistently available and I became, by necessity my own parent before I had finished being someone’s child.

That is a particular kind of loss. One that does not always get named. One that people do not always recognise as grief because there is no single moment, no single event. Just a slow, gradual absence where something should have been.

But I felt it. I feel it still and here I am now.

In my thirties.

Starting life. Actually starting not continuing, not building on a foundation but beginning. Laying the first bricks. Looking around at a world where other people seem to have been building for a decade already and wondering sometimes, on the hard days what it would have felt like to have had that head start.

I am doing this alone.

Not alone as a romantic notion. Not the solitude of someone who chose space. Alone as a practical reality. Without the safety net. Without the family unit that catches you when you fall. Without the financial inheritance or the emotional inheritance that makes beginning feel less like an impossibility and more like a choice.

Just me. My two hands. My history. My gift and

Spirit.

That last one is not small. But I will come back to it.

I want to talk about the struggle. The real current ongoing one because this is not a story with a tidy resolution. This is not the part where I tell you I went through all of that and came out the other side completely healed and now I float through life on a cloud of spiritual serenity.

I still struggle.

Some days the old patterns show up like uninvited guests who know exactly where the spare key is. The hypervigilance. The difficulty trusting. The part of me that still sometimes scans a room for danger before it relaxes into presence. The old story the one that was written for me before I could write my own that still sometimes pipes up at the worst possible moment to ask: who do you think you are?

I still feel the grief. Not every day. But sometimes, in the way grief works completely without warning.

I still find connection complicated. Not impossible I am learning, slowly with intention what safe connection actually feels like in the body but complicated. The kind of complicated that requires ongoing work and ongoing compassion toward myself.

I still have days where the somatic feeling that grounded, embodied sense of being in my own life, in my own body, safe and present and whole feels further away than I would like.

I am not going to pretend otherwise because the whole point of this is honesty and honesty requires me to say: I am still in it. Still finding my way. Still walking a road that is sometimes clear and sometimes feels like I am navigating in the dark with a small light and a lot of faith.

But here is what I also have.

The gift.

The one that showed up uninvited and persistent and refused to be reasoned away no matter how many times I tried.

Mediumship.

The ability to bridge worlds. To sit with someone in their grief and bring through the people they thought they had lost forever. To offer the impossible gift of continued connection across the greatest distance there is and it did not arrive despite everything I went through.

It arrived because of it.

I understand grief from the inside. I understand what it is to lose someone before you were ready which let’s be honest is always before you were ready. I understand the particular shape of the loss that does not come with a funeral. The kind that lives in the daily absence of someone who should still be here.

I understand what it is to feel alone in a crowd. To reach for connection and find air. To need someone to bridge the gap between where you are and where you cannot get to on your own.

I understand that because I have lived it and now slowly imperfectly with shaking hands on the days when the doubt is loudest I am turning it into something.

Something for you.

When I say I am building something special I need you to understand what I mean.

I am not building a brand. I am not building a platform for the sake of having one.

I am building a space for the ones who were never supposed to make it and made it anyway.

For the children who grew up in unsafe homes and are now adults trying to find out what safety actually feels like.

For the ones who fell behind in school not because they weren’t brilliant but because they were too busy surviving to sit still and learn.

For the ones who stood at the edge of every social situation wondering why belonging felt like something that happened to other people.

For the ones who lost siblings. Who lost parents too soon. Who were separated from their families and had to grieve that in the silence of a life that kept moving regardless.

For the ones in their thirties starting from scratch, building alone, refusing to give up even when the evidence for giving up is honestly quite compelling.

For the ones who have nothing left but Spirit and are reaching sometimes desperately, sometimes quietly, sometimes with a faith that is more hope than certainty for connection. For trust. For the somatic, felt-sense knowing that they are exactly where they are supposed to be.

I am building it for you because I am you.

You are looking at the one who walked this road before you.

Not ahead of you by so far that I have forgotten what the beginning feels like. Close enough to turn around and reach back. Close enough to say I know where you are. I know what that feels like in the body and here is what I found a few steps further on.

Here is what I want to say to you clearly, simply without caveats and without conditions:

You deserve to be happy.

Not eventually. Not once you have healed everything and resolved everything and become the finished polished version of yourself.

Now.

As you are.

With the history and the struggle and the unfinished healing and the ongoing work and the days when everything feels hard and the days when the connection feels close and the days when you genuinely cannot tell the difference between growth and falling apart which, by the way sometimes look remarkably similar.

You deserve to be happy in the middle of all of that.

Nobody gets to come to this earth and spend their entire time here in pain without that being a tragedy and I refuse I absolutely refuse to accept that as the ending for any of us.

We were not born into those stories to be defined by them.

We were born into them to understand them. To survive them. To find the gift inside them even when the gift is buried so deep under the rubble that finding it feels like archaeology and then when we have found it to reach back for the ones still living inside those stories and show them there is a way through.

That is what I am doing.

That is what we are doing.

I do not have this all figured out.

I want to be clear about that because I think the world has enough teachers pretending to be further along than they are. Enough people speaking from a place of arrived when really they are still, like all of us in transit.

I am in transit.

But I am moving and I am finding slowly on some days reluctantly, on other days with something that almost feels like joy that the moving itself is the thing. Not the destination. The actual, imperfect, courageous act of continuing to move forward in the direction of the life and the work and the connection that I know deep down is mine.

Mediumship is mine.

This community is mine and if you are here if something in your story recognised something in mine then perhaps this space is yours too.

We are going to find it together.

The trust. The connection. The somatic feeling of being alive in a body that is finally, finally, starting to feel like home.

We are going to find it imperfectly and non-linearly and with humour on the days when humour is all that is left and tears on the days when nothing else will do.

But we are going to find it.

I know this because I am still finding it.

Every day. In the small moments. In the moments of my own connection that crack something open. In the connections that remind me why all of it every single hard and complicated and grief-soaked chapter of it was worth walking through.

I am still here.

You are still here and still here, when you came from where we came from is not nothing.

Still here is everything.

I am not who my story said I would be. I am who I decided to become in spite of it and I am still deciding. Every single day. Right alongside you.