Dear S,

OMG, this last eighteen months have been so extreme. That’s the word I keep using with my therapist. Extreme. I’ve waited this long to write cos I think things are shifting, so I can just about bear to get it down. I should apologise first though because there’s a lot.

It started last Spring when I fell out of our attic. Was in a back brace for months. I’ve included a pic. It’s blurry and I’ve got bed-hair and dark circles but I quite like it. Sort of sci-fi. And the light shining up at me from behind seems, I dunno, meaningful somehow.

A few months after, my eldest sister B smashed up her ankle. She only fell off a kerb but turns out she has osteoporosis and that’s why it broke so badly. That’s a surprise because she’s weight-trained for decades which is supposed to be brilliant for bone density. She needed surgery and months of recovery but the most extreme part is that she ended up in the same hospital as our estranged mother who B had to witness epically, biblically abusing all the ward staff.

Then in Spring this year my other sister M (who I do SequinnedSeaSisters with) fell from a mezzanine and broke her hip and had to have 3 metal pins put in. Which is quite a lot to deal with when she already has M.E. and Fibromyalgia and, for the last two years, this Chronic Inflammatory Sinus condition that’s put her in all this horrible extra pain. You know M, she’s pretty stoic, has a joyful heart, she’s lived with the Fibro and M.E. for at least fifteen years. But the relentlessly infected, swollen sinuses, not being able to breathe or sleep, threatened to tip her over the edge. So when two weeks after the hip surgery, a sinus operation she’s been waiting forever for came through she had to go ahead. It was a big worry for us how much she could withstand- blood and rawness and after-care doings four times a day along with her hip stuff – pain, exercises, healing – being stuck in one room for months. I cycled over when I could – till I got ill and couldn’t risk giving her an infection.

Being apart, our routines broken, our work paused, becoming hyper-aware of the fragility of loved ones – destabilised me. Things felt bleak and frightening because…

(Continued in Part 2)