2 October 2025

Today is my 32nd birthday. More importantly, I made it. In October 2024, I was worried that I wouldn’t get here at all. I’ve only spoken about it privately and written about it in stories — I know some of you have seen them and I still appreciate all the kind words. For anyone else, I spent 2024 seriously struggling with my health following a Covid infection. In February 2025, I finally crashed. Hard. Life threatening anaemia, a superficial thrombosis extending from my mid thigh to ankle in my left leg, Baker’s cyst immobilising my right leg, systemic inflammation, borderline systemic infection. I’m not fully recovered, but I’m able to live again and I’ve been feeling improvements month over month. It’s a gradual recovery, but a recovery nonetheless.

Astrologically, I’m an 8th house Sun and it felt like an 8th house profection year at its most intense and archetypal — crisis, trauma, reckoning after reckoning, near death, and a rebirth that is still slowly unfolding. I still have bad days, sometimes bad weeks. I still cry because it all feels like too much sometimes. I still feel upset that my distance vision was significantly and permanently damaged. I still struggle to talk about it without talking too much or trailing off mid sentence.

Still, I believe that I can eventually alchemise this as I have done before in the wake of terrible and traumatising experiences in the past. I’ve never forced forgetfulness. I actually don’t want to forget. I hold the memories close as a means of keeping perspective. It doesn’t seem like such trouble to be stuck in traffic or have plans fall through after you’ve survived something so much worse. I’d rather be stuck in a long line at the pharmacy than unable to stand in it at all. I don’t keep the memories to dwell, I keep them to remember where I’ve come from and what I’ve survived.

I think one of the hardest and most important things is to disallow the trauma the privilege of becoming your identity. It can’t be undone and the scars are terrible, but we are never truly defined by what we’ve been forced to endure and survive. It’s our choice to live, love, grow, fight, be ‘difficult’ when it’s in our best interests, when to forgive and when not to forgive, follow our northern star, and accept that moving forward sometimes involves following the path back far enough to find an adjoining path that leads in a better direction. I’ve had 32 years and I’m still learning, but I don’t think that we should ever stop learning and allowing ourselves to grow and evolve.

It’s not anyone else’s story, it’s yours and you’ve got to roll — with the hand that life has dealt you, the changes, the good times and the bad times, the seasons of your life that you didn’t ask for but will surely learn something from. I still believe that everything happens for a reason, it’s only that sometimes that reason isn’t revealed to us with as much haste as we might desire.

With love,
A