There’s something really powerful in recognising when you need to change direction.
It feels very similar to the night she left — when I walked into the Best Room, my colourful Wonderland sanctuary. A place of solace. A place of calm.
I looked to the left — the antique sideboard, covered in spirits and wines and exotic liquors from different corners of the world.
Then I looked to the right — where the 130-year-old piano, kindly gifted by a friend, stood silently proud, willing its kinship in that moment. Realistically, though, anything more ambitious than a scale with these currently unpractised fingers would’ve ended in an orthopaedic catastrophe. Disco Granny attempting the Macarena after 15 sherries.
I looked back to the left, thinking, this would make this shit disappear for a bit…
But I realised I’m past needing things to disappear now. I have to feel every atom of this if I’m going to heal.
You need to be sober to feel.
Rational brain kicks in:
Do you really want beer shits in the morning, a raging headache, sticky brain, and life-regret decisions?
The Jemma-that-once-was would’ve thrown caution to the wind in a metaphorical “fuck you” moment — smashed through the lot, got the yah-yahs out, acted first, thought later.
And I chuckled, realising that the thought that ultimately stopped me wasn’t growth or wisdom — it was the sheer reticence to shave my arsehole for anyone right now.
Isn’t the human brain wonderful in a crisis?
Back to my mission.
I knew that today was the day.
Do I let this destroy me? Do I spiral? Or do I change direction? And what the fuck does that even look like now?
Playing the piano for seven solid hours until the pain in my hands overtook the stabbing ache in my gut hadn’t cut it.
But I had walked away from temptation.
Baby steps.
In a desperate attempt to navigate the thoughts tunnelling through my brain like a Dickensian labyrinth of decaying alleyways, I had bought some walking poles.
Now, anyone who knew me 15 years ago would know the only walking I entertained was to the fridge — or the morning-after walk of shame to the tram.
But these poles meant something different.
This wasn’t that kind of walk.
Not the one where I’d wake up still drunk (if I’d slept at all), retracing my steps like a broken zoetrope of blurry, regrettable snapshots.
Not the “who the fuck is this” number on a crumpled bus ticket found in a pocket as deep as the regrets from the night before.
I started thinking about all the walks I’ve taken in 38 years.
Walks of regret.
Walks of chaos.
Walks where I had absolutely no idea where I was going but somehow still ended up on my feet.
I’ve walked myself into injury, into danger, into joy, into love.
I’ve also walked past things my brain quietly buried — splinters of memory I didn’t want to feel.
So I’d bought the poles.
Partly symbolic.
Partly because I genuinely thought I might regurgitate a lung or lose a kneecap.
Disco Granny, but pre-emptive.
I’m aware my last post sounded self-pitying.
It’s not me.
I’m usually that fat, funny bird from Barnsley people say, “Oh God, she’s hilarious.”
Some think it’s attention. Some think it’s ADHD.
But it’s just how I see the world — pragmatically prismatic.
Unapologetically fuckless.
I weave through life telling the truth, cushioning it with humour and self-deprecation so it doesn’t completely annihilate me.
Think Robin Williams… with a bigger arse.
Truth has always been my lighthouse.
Say what needs to be said — just don’t cause harm doing it.
And yes, I’m a gobshite. Through and through. It’s no secret that I could talk a glass eye to sleep.
But talking is how I process.
Talking is how I heal.
It’s also how I’ve historically walked myself into trouble.
But it’s also how I walk myself out.
Except… for the last two and a half years, I haven’t really spoken.
I’ve talked — but I haven’t spoken.
It’s been that metallic taste of biting my tongue. Orphaned words sitting there, never allowed to exist out loud.
And in trying so hard to say things carefully, calculating how to safely sever the artery feeding this growing tumour of censorship, I had never noticed that I was dying the death of a thousand silent paper cuts.
Ironic, really.
Langsett.
The breeze there feels different.
Unfiltered. Uninhibited. Safe.
And as I walk, I realise something:
I did a lot of talking — but I never truly spoke.
The weight of that hits.
Hard.
Thankfully, misery doesn’t stand a chance against a soggy Alsatian.
Bowie wedges his head between my knees like he’s offering emotional support — turns out he’s just tangled in his lead.
Still. It works.
I laugh.
Langsett mattered.
It was our place.
Our first proper date.
We had fun there, even if my cute little moment with the yellow fuzzy caterpillar was a subconscious coverup for the fact that I was about to become an organ donor after wheezing my way to the top of the hill.
The beginning.
I’d even secretly planned to propose there — Google pins dropped along the route, a treasure hunt leading to a ring and a future.
Funny, really.
What once felt like fate now feels like fiction.
I’d laughed off the early signs. The comments. The subtle digs.
That’s the thing about being a funny fuck with cripplingly low self esteem. There I’d been, two and a half years ago thinking ‘fuck me, this lass is bloody fit, and she’s talking to ME?!’
But it shouldn’t have ever happened…
What once had started as a joke that she’d initially swiped left on Hinge, but in an uncharacteristic glitch of the app I had circled back around offering my digital self to a her as a re-swipe… Contextually now, this previously humourous fact now left nil but a sour taste in my mouth.
Didn’t realise I was losing myself in the process.
If that relationship was the Titanic, I’d rather someone had lobbed an iceberg at it early doors instead of letting it slowly sink under layers of bullshit and deception.
At least then it would’ve been quick.
Clean.
Honest.
Salt-corroded memories fossilised and buried so deep that only the most determined of aquatic scavengers would ever reveal them, like opening up a depressingly shit Blue Peter time capsule.
I wonder what other things I’d bury in a time capsule of my life (I actually have a life goal list that includes a wish to make one to open before I’m 69, though knowing me I’d likely forget where the chuffing thing was).
Would I look back with fondness at my past slightly less-bearded self and smile affectionately, the self esteem issues that had plagued my whole life thus far, a distant memory? Would the most depressing bit be the gas bill? Would it be a list of all the Nearly-but-Not snapshots in my life that had pulled the metaphorical rug from beneath me?
In a parallel universe, she’d swiped left that second time too and I was saved from this existential crisis, periodically in the here and now punctuated by the soft wet Bowie nose.
There’s not one person that wouldn’t wish to present their best version to the world on a dating app, however I wasn’t expecting to be dating a Yorkshire chameleon, the whole debacle transpiring to be as disorienting and welcomed as the bubonic plague.
Back in the present — coffee, friendship, breathless steps uphill.
We joke about the cannonball of parenthood, moving towards an age where reaching your own arsehole becomes a gymnastic feat, beards becoming an eventual inevitability but still welcoming the growth and gratitude of those little moments as your Small becomes Tall that remain tattooed on your hearts as you silently will time to slow down. Every adult conversation interrupted by parenthood remains a much longed for and welcomed moment of warmth. They are not moments you wish away. You don’t wish for time to pass in order to make those precious moments fewer and farther between.
I keep walking.
Because I have to.
At the summit, I stop.
This is it.
(After a brief and deeply undignified encounter with a bush that tried to exfoliate my entire fanny mid-piss…)
I dig.
And Christ, it’s harder than it should be.
Physically. Mentally. Emotionally.
Surely it shouldn’t be this hard to dig a fucking hole to close a chapter in your life?
A tiny plastic trowel against something much bigger.
Symbolic, really.
Eventually, there’s a hole.
And it’s just me, my thoughts, and everything I’ve been avoiding.
I take off the ring.
The one that symbolised commitment.
Now just…weight.
I run my fingers over the irregular notches in it’s design, crafted using the Japanese ethos of ‘wabi-sabi’, the unique beauty of imperfection and transience. It’s fucking beautiful and I feel a pang of sadness.
“I’m cutting the rope. I’m freeing myself.”
I don’t even realise I’m saying it out loud at first.
Then I am.
Louder.
Stronger.
Until it feels real.
I soak up the solitude of this moment, look across and see Sara patiently waiting, Bowie’s ears cocked picking up my whispers carried in the wind.
And then I drop it in.
It hits harder than I expect.
Like something inside me collapses and expands at the same time.
Memories, feelings, everything tied up in that one small object.
I make a mental note to tell Sara that in spite of all the damage and pain and need to heal that that this whole chapter has left me with, I’m really pissed off about having a fucking misshapen finger.
I briefly deliberate over whether to bury the ring I’d given her, now that’s it’s back with me, so painstakingly designed and crafted as a unique symbolism of my love for her. I quickly shake my head, and this incredulous idea away.
The power had disappeared from the ring I’d placed on her finger the minute she walked out of my life.
Now, I cut that tie by removing the power from my own ring.
I need to finish this story my way.
All of those memories encapsulated in that one little ring. And I look at it for a minute, having a little sob.
Thoughts, spiralling sensations, bodily feelings, memories, jokes, laughs, happy times, sad times, the times that I never quite knew which way we were going.
Hands shaking, I cover it.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
“This is where it ends.”
I think how this moment could actually be beautifully poetic, were it not representative of the whole fucking heartbreaking shitshow that’s been the last two weeks of my life.
With each pile of dirt, I’m cutting the rope, I’m freeing myself. Reminding myself that this process is necessary.
I build a rock stack.
Balance.
Control.
Something steady after chaos.
In every significant life transition, these rock stacks have been present. They represent the movement from darkness toward healing and the weight of contemplative learning. More than markers, they signify my own introspection—the quiescence necessary to achieve such a fragile, hard-won balance.
I made one on the top of Snowdonia. I make one every time I go to my dad’s cave. I made hundreds of them at Creswell Beach when I was really unwell just before qualifying.
For me, the act of making these stacks represent a moment of equilibrium, finding the balance between gravity physics and shaking but well-intending hands, knowing that one stray thought could see it topple (and it would appear that Small has developed a taste for it too).
Feeling really fucking proud of myself with a sharp intake of breath I said one last time-
“I cut the rope, I free myself“
And then I stand up.
And walk away.
On the way back, something shifts.
Not completely. Not magically.
But enough.
I laugh again — properly.
Watching Bowie attempt to dig a hole in water.
Relentless. Determined. Completely pointless.
And it hits me.
That’s what I’d been doing.
Pouring everything into something that was never going to hold.
I’m not fully there yet.
I don’t have the answers.
But I have something more important.
I tried.
Back at the car, I look behind me.
Hoping I’ve left it all buried there.
The ghosts. The weight. The what-wasn’ts.
I don’t know what comes next.
But I know this:
I cut the rope.
I freed myself.
And now, for the first time in a long time, I’m walking forward with nothing left pulling me back.
