Hello, I'm still here...
...but hopefully you didn't even notice I was gone.
Do you ever get those months where you feel like you’ve been to the moon and back? Or perhaps Baku and back, but it may not be dissimilar.
The last few weeks of my life have felt extraordinary. Not in the way that happens when someone dies, or a tragedy strikes (although something terribly sad did occur), but when the magnitude of the every day builds up in every single facet of your life, and the spinning plates start to fly off in all directions. Some of it has been about caring for others, some trying to manage admin which was really quite critical. Some of it has been taken up with travelling, and the minutiae of arranging complex travel, and a lot of it has been managing wildly escalating emotions and rapidly changing situations.
As a result of that, I haven’t written on here as much as I would have liked to, and I questioned this today in the
community. How does it feel when life overwhelms and you feel like you’ve lost your Substack Sparkle? Is it easy to get it back? challenged me to get right on it and ask that question now, to you, so here goes…I think that perhaps I haven’t been as absent to readers as I feel that I have. I think we hold such high standards for how we should show up, and if it’s in notes, or shorter posts, or not at all for a while, then that’s ok. [I could write a whole piece on the word ‘should’…]
I look back on my recent notes, and I notice two things:
I feel the pleading in my outreach - ‘I’m still here, don’t forget me!’, but most of all an underlying question: ‘Tell me you feel the same…sometimes?’
There is also a sadness, I see how by being ‘absent’, I have felt disconnected and lonely. How I have felt like I’m ‘outside looking in’, and again that undercurrent of ‘Tell me that sometimes you feel the same’.
I created Lemon Soul for connection, so that we would know we’re not alone in these moments of vulnerability. And I know that we are not. The response to these notes has been beautiful and warm, and I am so grateful for this 🫶.
Two days after I posted the first note above with the ‘I woke up like this’ photo [you’ll need to read the note for full effect!] my in-laws turned up from Spain as a surprise for Fiver’s 18th, taking us up to 5 relatives, 3 dogs and a sick mum in residence. So we chucked a few more spuds in with the roast and celebrated being together as Fiver was due to head off to Dublin that week with her boyfriend for her birthday trip. The next day, Fiver’s boyfriend broke his foot and couldn’t travel (at least she got to spend extra time with her grandparents). This did, however, lead to a flurry of emotional distress, anger at Ryanair’s cancellation policies, phone calls to hotels, frantic re-selling of gig tickets, all interspersed with Taz having an allergic reaction to an almond and having to go for anaphylaxis awareness and epipen training amidst her own comedy of errors.
As I temporarily left the teenage chaos and fifty billion family members to attend brain scans with mum, I honestly felt like I was a character in an intense (and not quite believable) sit-com script. Mum got the all-clear. Hoorah! But then something truly heartbreaking happened. A boy in Taz’s class died in the saddest of circumstances. Notwithstanding the utter devastation this will have wreaked on his family, in its own small way, her whole world changed in that moment. Not primarily because of her own relationship to him, but due to the enormity of having to grasp the concept of how someone could be laughing and joking with you at a party on Saturday night, and then absent from school on Monday, never to return again. Lessons on the brutal impermanence of life that I wish she hadn’t had to learn so young, whilst also carrying the deep sadness of collective grief and aching pain for his loved ones.
I’m not sure I’ve ever contained the range of emotions I have in the last month - but it’s been the emotions of those I love, as all the things happened to them, not to me. Winning a gymnastics bronze medal at a European championship, turning 18, losing a friend. When it’s my own grief and elation that I need to manage, that’s different - there are others to turn to, the support kicks in. This has been quite extraordinary as I am the support, which is an utterly privileged position to be able to hold. Yet inevitably things have slipped through the net… A college application missed (with very final ‘you are not getting a place’ consequences for Taz 😔)… emails from my publisher unanswered…Substack unattended…
But this is what makes up the fabric of life, and that’s ok. At these moments, perhaps we need to be more forgiving of ourselves. It’s not possible to hold all of the things, all of the time. So for now I am going to put away the piles of birch twigs I use to self-flagellate for what I haven’t been doing, and acknowledge what I have been doing:
Holding, caring, loving, absorbing, protecting.
And now I have some room to breathe, I’m very happy to be here saying ‘Hello’, and hoping to be more present again. Asking:
do you have times when you feel the same?
what do you do when you get disconnected?
how do you fare with ‘self-kindness’ and ‘self-forgiveness’ when you feel you aren’t showing up as you ‘should’?
I imagine many of you will experience the same feelings as I do, but know that however you are showing up, there is always a space for you here on my sofa. I think that sometimes we just need reminding that it’s ok to come and go 🫶.
I want to say a huge thank you to
for encouraging me to ask and answer this question for myself, and for having one of those very communities that holds the door wide open with the most gentle and meaningful support. If you’re not already a sparkler - do take a look. It’s a magical place. ✨💕As always,
Love & lemons 💕🍋
Em xx
My first book, Breaking Waves, is coming out March 2025 and is currently available for pre-order. If you want to learn more about the book publication process (what it’s REALLY like) then you can read all about that on my dedicated Book Deal Diaries series. This includes the ultimate VIDEO MASTERCLASS ‘From Book Inception to Book Deal Moment’. Paid subscribers have access to all of it.
You can pre-order BREAKING WAVES here:
Thanks so much for sharing what you’ve been going through, and wow does it sound like a lot! Being the person holding space for other people’s feelings is a gift, but the gift can be heavy at times, so remember to take care of yourself where you can.
I’m quite new to substack but what I’ve found is that the “shoulds” we’re so used don’t really live here. I love that the writers I read take their time, they post when it works for them and their lives, their frequency waxes and wanes with the pressures of life - and it’s all ok. We’re all still here for you. ❤️
Gosh that all sounds intense. I think it's OK for our presence here to wax and wane a little. It's human and unavoidable, and I think readers are much more forgiving than we imagine (not to mention, often distracted with other things and hardly noticing).... at least that's what I told myself when I disappeared offline completely for a month in June!