I call myself a writer these days although it makes me laugh. I love a good poem too, which will always be my first love since age 11. Maybe in another life, I might have been a poet from Aotearoa. After three spinal surgeries in the past few years, being in recovery has become my normal and has felt endless at times. To be honest, I didn't want to live, it was all too hard.

I thought about what I would be leaving behind for my children to find and gathered up all my journals, 21 of them. I was going to have a burning ceremony but I began reading them. I found some things worth saving, poems, prayers and pieces of my life story. I decided to put some things into Google Docs to leave behind for my children and grandchildren to find.

In the back of a few journals I had started to write my life story and then always stopped because it was painful. I have managed to write a short memoir called Orchard Bones, it was very healing getting it all out. I then wrote Heroines I’ve Met Along the Way to leave to my daughter, I want her to know all the amazing women who have impacted my life and changed me along the way. Then Ink and Ashes was born to explain what writing means to me, to explain why I began to write and how I think it might have saved my life.. 

My writing entwines 46 years, of silence, of writing and survival, scribbled onto pieces of paper and into journals once forgotten about. Writing to me has always been my way to heal and make sense of life and what I have lived through. 

These days, I write to both honour what remains and to note down the beauty that keeps finding its way to me in everyday life. I began sharing small pieces on Substack, where a growing community of nearly 500 readers now gathers around my reflections and poems. I didn’t just write three little books, I ended up making a map of how my soul keeps sewing itself back together. Orchard Bones holds my roots, Heroines traces my lineage, and Ink and Ashes feels like the fire that remade me.

There’s something quietly holy about turning my journals into living words before deciding to burn them. I was sorting out what’s meant to stay and ended up staying myself which feels like some sort of alchemy in slow motion. The Substack community has been a small, unexpected grace, all people I have never met, but who are listening in quietly. It's been pretty good company to keep while healing a spine and a life.

Maybe I will write about the surgeries and all of this one day who knows. I have been giving some thought as to what part I would want people to understand.. Maybe not about the pain, but about what it did to my sense of self. Anyway, that is a little bit about me for whoever ends up reading this.

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