I’ll be honest, I’ve been debating whether to write this or not. Whether to share this struggle that I’ve had this past week. But then my beautiful friend Fiona of earthsoulsky fame, said to me that I needed to keep this. I needed to keep note of this. I realised that my need for a creative form of expression only came about because of intense emotional highs and lows a long while ago. If my creativity was vital to my self-healing, how could I not write and share it.

So here it is.

When I made the move over here, I knew that there was going to come a time where my energy was no longer carried along on the wave of novelty that overwhelmed me when I first arrived. That once the feeling of being on an extended holiday morphed into that of this being my new everyday existence, that a new level of emotional and self-sufficient strength was required.

It came out of the blue the past week. I had just come back from my solo week in Cornwall, where I had revelled in the freedom of solo travelling in a new part of the world I had not been well acquainted with. And then I came back to Devon and I inexplicably was beset with crippling fear. If I had just sat there subjectively and looked at the contributing environmental factors. The rain had been persistent, to say the least, I was having issues with my memory cards and I just felt like just the littlest of things exacerbating this feeling. I was on an emotional rollercoaster.

I was right at the peak of my fear and perhaps should have just taken a few deep breaths and ploughed on through at the time. But all I could focus on was how removed I was from my network and support system. Why can I never get on to anyone when I really need them? A question I had asked myself on countless occasions over the years. Why did it always happen when I was at my absolute low? My default reaction was to panic and let myself fall through the imaginary floors of despair in my mind. I was angry, I didn’t want this now. The chaos in my mind was becoming deafening.

I had to change the dynamic. So I asked myself why. Why did this come up now, why is this coming up with such emotional force? I came to the conclusion that these challenging situations have come up again because they are an opportunity to try dealing with them in a different way. It’s come up again because I didn’t deal with them in the most effective way for ME when I’ve been challenged in the past.

What happened in the past could no longer define or frame my response and way out of the current situation. I felt that if I let the fear of the past have free reign over me now it would eradicate all the positive work I have done within myself the past couple of years. Don’t I owe it to ‘that’ me who so desperately sought a more self-sufficient way of healing her wounds to keep calm acknowledge the fear and move past it? And the answer is I do. I owe it to myself to be able to self heal.

Then the most amazing thing happened on Saturday. The power was cut to the house all morning and most of the afternoon. It was like a circuit breaker sign from the universe. Get back out there. Come back to the reasons why you came to England in the first place. To explore, to photograph, to write. To transform my own life for myself. And it proved to be a system reset. I felt that rush of why I came here in the first place and my whole energy changed. The simple act of bringing myself back to the basic premise of why I came here purified my energy and the volume was turned way down on the fear.

I know the fear is there, but I know how I can deal with it now. Accepting that will be there, but that it’s up to me as to how loud I let it become, how much attention I feed it.