Two Years

“It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s.” – Lupita Nyong’o

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demons on the boat

Anxiety, Storms & Demons on the Boat

Sometimes life is very loud. Thoughts, worries, ideas and concerns spin around and around inside my head all at the same time, jumbling together to create a mess of confusion that’s impossible to find a way through. Finding myself in the middle of this mess is often totally overwhelming. I have spent many years in doctors’ offices and counselling sessions in an attempt to treat my severe anxiety. I have talked a lot, been given

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Gratitude & frustration: post-transplant body image

My hair and I are in a long-term love/hate relationship. For many years, I absolutely hated it. I’m adopted, so nobody else in my family had hair as curly as mine. My parents weren’t particularly adept styling it when I was growing up, so we just kind of ignored that it was the way it was and did the best we could. I brushed it out and tied it up and…it didn’t always go very

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Four days. 723 transplant recipients. One amazing experience.

If I had to think of a list of words to describe myself, “sporty” or “athletic” would absolutely not feature. I don’t really even like to watch sport, and I not-so-secretly pride myself on being the least rugby-knowledgeable Kiwi most people will ever meet. Attending an event like the British Transplant Games wasn’t something that really ever registered in my mind. I knew friends of mine had been in the past, but I never considered going

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Me, Billy the Kid…and Mr. Right?

In September last year, I turned 30. My younger self always thought I’d be married by now. In my mind, it was just how life worked. I would finish secondary school and university. Then I would build a career, buy a house and somewhere in between all those milestones Mr. Right would appear. He would eventually be followed by children and we would be set. Funnily enough, a complex medical condition, multitude of scars and

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