Author: Margaretha Montagu

As you may know, I spend part of my time hosting Camino de Santiago walking and writing retreats, and another part happily scribbling away with the Wordweavers in the southwest of France writing group, At one of our meetings—daringly scheduled on Friday the 13th of February 2026—I shared the little story that follows.

This is part 2 of the story of a doctor who spent years teaching other people how to breathe… and only much later discovered that she herself had forgotten how. Dr. Anna Vermeer was a competent, respected, thoroughly overworked physician who could diagnose stress in her patients within minutes and prescribe sensible solutions with great confidence. Every day people arrived in her office with tight chests, racing thoughts, insomnia, and the quiet sense that life had become a little too much.

Anna listened carefully, reassured them, and encouraged them to slow down.

Meanwhile, she ran through her own life at a pace that suggested the building might catch fire at any moment. She believed this was normal. Responsible people carried heavy loads. Dedicated professionals stayed busy. Doctors, after all, were supposed to take care of everyone else.

Part 2

The patient arrived late in the afternoon, during that strange hour when the pace at the clinic felt slow and suffocating. You could literally sense it in the air. The receptionist’s cheerful voice had dropped half a tone. The coffee machine had been used so often it now sounded faintly resentful. Even the fluorescent lights seemed to hum with a sort of bureaucratic fatigue.

Anna glanced at the chart. Michael Laurent. Age 42. Chest tightness. Shortness of breath. Another stress case, most likely. Or a heart attack preparing to happen. She stepped into the waiting room and called his name.

Michael stood up too quickly, knocking his knee against the chair with a dull thud. He looked like a man who had been running — not physically, but internally — for quite some time. His eyes were slightly too wide, his shoulders crunched up somewhere near his ears.

Anna had seen this many times. The posture of a nervous system on high alert.

They sat in the stuffy, overheated consultation room. “So,” Anna said gently. “Tell me what’s been happening.” Michael rubbed his chest. “It feels like… I can’t quite get a full breath,” he said. “Like something is pressing here.” He tapped the centre of his sternum. Anna nodded, already assembling the familiar mental checklist. Stress. Overwork. Anxiety. Too much caffeine. Not enough sleep.

The physical exam was reassuring. Heart rate a little fast, but steady. Lungs clear. Blood pressure slightly elevated but not alarming. Nothing dangerous. No impending heart attack. Anna sat back in her chair. “I think what you’re experiencing is stress,” she said calmly. Michael gave a small, helpless laugh. “That’s what my wife says.” Wives, Anna reflected privately, were often excellent diagnosticians.

She reached for the smooth river stones on her desk and slid one toward him. “Let’s try something simple,” she said. “Just a breathing exercise.” Michael looked sceptical, but he picked up the stone. It rested in his palm, cool and reassuring, like something that had been quietly patient for thousands of years. “Close your eyes if you like,” Anna said. Michael obeyed. “Now breathe in slowly through your nose, for four counts.” He inhaled, shoulders rising. “Hold it for four counts.” The room grew quiet. Outside in the corridor, someone laughed, the sound strident before fading away. “And now breathe out slowly. For four counts.” Michael exhaled, and his shoulders dropped a fraction.

Anna watched him, calm and professional. She had guided hundreds of patients through this exact exercise — slow the breath, calm the nervous system, remind the body it was safe. Simple. Routine.

Except that something strange happened next.

In the quiet of the room, as Michael inhaled again, Anna suddenly became aware of her own breathing. Or rather — of the lack of it. Her chest felt tight. Not painful. Just constrained, like a door that should open fully but only moved halfway. She tried to take a deeper breath. The air stopped somewhere in the upper part of her lungs.

That was odd. She tried again, discreetly this time. Inhale. Halfway. Stop. A small flicker of irritation creased her forehead. Perhaps she was sitting awkwardly. She straightened her back slightly. Michael exhaled again, longer this time. Anna attempted another deep breath. No better. Too shallow. Her lungs seemed to have developed an unexpected opinion about the situation.

Michael opened his eyes. “That actually helps a little,” he said. “Good,” Anna replied automatically.

But something had shifted. Her attention had turned inward. She inhaled again, quietly. No better. The realisation crept in slowly, like a draft under a door. She could not remember the last time she had taken a truly deep breath — not a polite, functional breath, but a real one. The kind that fills the lungs completely, expands the ribs, and settles somewhere deep in the belly. She tried again. Inhale. Block. It felt as though an invisible belt had been tightened around her chest.

Michael was breathing more easily now. His shoulders had dropped, and the small panic in his eyes had softened. Meanwhile, Anna felt a strange ripple of unease. This was absurd. She was the calm one. The expert. She guided people out of stress every day. And yet here she was, sitting perfectly still in her own consulting room, unable to take a full breath.

Michael set the stone back on the desk. “That’s strange,” he said thoughtfully. “When I focus on breathing, I realise how tense I’ve been all day.” Anna almost laughed. All day. What a charmingly optimistic time frame. Her own tension had been running a far longer marathon. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That happens.”

But now the realisation had begun spreading through her awareness like ink in water — the tightness in her shoulders, the constant forward lean of her posture, the way her mind never stopped moving from patient to patient, problem to problem, responsibility to responsibility.

Even now, part of her brain was already thinking about the next appointment. And the next. And the charts waiting on her desk.

Michael stood to leave. “Thank you, doctor,” he said. “I feel a bit calmer.” “I’m glad,” Anna said. She walked him to the door, her professional composure intact. But when the door closed behind him, the room felt unusually quiet. Anna sat back down slowly. The late afternoon sun had shifted, casting long amber bars of light across the floor. Dust particles floated lazily in the beam like tiny planets.

For a moment, time seemed to freeze — no phones ringing, no voices in the hallway, just silence.

Anna placed both hands flat on the desk and tried the breathing exercise again. Slow inhale. The air stopped halfway down. She exhaled slowly. Something uneasy stirred in her chest — not panic exactly, but recognition. A thought arrived, calm and unmistakable: you’ve been holding your breath for years. Anna sat very still. Outside, somewhere down the corridor, the coffee machine sputtered into life again. Another patient was probably waiting.

But for the first time in a very long time, Anna did not move immediately.

Instead, she remained there in the quiet consultation room, wondering when exactly she had forgotten how to breathe.

Part 3

Unique Walking Retreats

Understanding Self-Abandonment as a Nervous System Response, and how to Stop the Cycle for Good

People-pleasing is a survival response, not a character flaw, and what it takes to rewire this response.

What this is: A deep, science-informed look at why so many capable, intelligent people spend decades minimising their needs, suppressing their feelings, and contorting themselves to keep the peace, and what’s actually happening to your nervous system when you do it.

What this isn’t: A lecture about self-love, a cheerful “put yourself first!” pep talk, or yet another article telling you to take more bubble baths. We’re going deeper than that. It might hurt.

Read this if: You’re navigating a major life change (divorce, illness, loss, retirement, reinvention), you’ve noticed you’re always the one accommodating, and you’re quietly wondering whether there are other possible ways to respond.

5 Key Takeaways

6. Self-abandonment is a survival strategy, not a personality flaw. It developed when connecting felt conditional, and your nervous system did what nervous systems do: it adapted.
7. Fawning, freezing, and people-pleasing are nervous system responses, not choices. Understanding this shifts the conversation from self-blame to self-compassion, which is the only place real change happens.
8. Major life transitions are the most powerful moments to interrupt the pattern. When old structures collapse, old survival strategies become visible, and visible things can be changed.
9. The goal isn’t to become selfish; it’s to become a reliable internal source of safety. When you stop sourcing safety entirely from external approval, your relationships actually improve.
10. Healing is not a solo sport, but it does require solitude. Community, movement, nature, and honest reflection are not luxuries. They are the conditions under which nervous systems genuinely change.

Introduction: The Art of Making Yourself Very, Very Small

You know the moment. Someone asks what you’d like for dinner, and you say, “I don’t mind, whatever everyone else wants”, even though you are absolutely, categorically minding. Someone steamrolls your idea in a meeting and you hear yourself saying “no, no, that makes total sense” even as something in your chest quietly deflates. Someone behaves badly, and you spend the next three days wondering what you did wrong.

This is self-abandonment. And if you’re here, reading this, it’s likely not new information.

What might be new, though, is this: it has nothing to do with being weak, unassertive, or insufficiently self-aware. It has everything to do with your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do, prioritise connection over authenticity, because at some point in your history, connection felt like survival.

This article is for people who are navigating major life change and who are starting to notice, perhaps for the first time, just how much of themselves they’ve been quietly editing out. You’re not broken. You’re not beyond help. You’re actually, inconveniently, at the most powerful possible moment to do something about it.

By the time you finish reading, you’ll understand what’s actually happening physiologically when you disappear into someone else’s needs, why life transitions crack open this pattern in particular, and what the first concrete steps toward changing it look like, not in theory, but in practice.

What Does Self-Abandonment Actually Look Like in Real Life?

Sophie Brennan’s Story

The morning Sophie Brennan’s solicitor called to say the divorce was finalised, she made a pot of tea she didn’t drink, sat down at the kitchen table, and waited to feel something.

Nothing came. Just the distant hum of the refrigerator and the faint smell of someone else’s life, seventeen years of it, still pressed into the walls of the house she’d agreed to sell.

She’d always been, as people liked to say, “so good in a crisis.” Steady. Capable. The one who kept things moving. Through the years of her husband’s career upheavals, the children’s various adolescent catastrophes, her mother’s long illness, Sophie had been the hub around which everything else turned. She prided herself on it, the way some people pride themselves on being able to parallel park in one go.

What she hadn’t noticed, because you rarely notice the water you swim in, was that she’d spent seventeen years, possibly longer, doing something very specific: she’d been making herself easier to love by making herself harder to see.

The habit had started early. Growing up in a house where emotional weather could change without warning, where her father’s approval came and went like Irish sunshine, Sophie had learned to read the room before she entered it. To adjust. To smooth. To become, as necessary, whatever version of herself created the least friction. She’d been good at it. She still was.

At 51, she was also exhausted in a way that sleep didn’t fix.

It was her GP, a woman of carefully calibrated patience, who first used the word. Not diagnosis, nothing so dramatic. Just a gentle observation across a desk cluttered with coffee cups and patient files: “Sophie, I wonder if you’ve spent so long managing everyone else’s needs that you’ve lost track of your own.”

Sophie had nodded politely, driven home, cried for forty minutes in the car park of a Tesco Extra, and then gone in to buy milk she didn’t need because doing something practical felt safer than sitting with the feeling.

That was the first crack.

The second came six months later, on a dusty trail in the south of France. She’d signed up for a walking retreat on something between impulse and desperation, the kind of decision you make at 2am when you’ve read the same paragraph four times and realised you haven’t the faintest idea what it said. Something about the Camino. Something about finding your next chapter. Something about storytelling and horses, which had made no logical sense but had felt, in the way that things sometimes feel before your rational mind can veto them, like exactly right.

The morning of the first walk, the air smelled of wild thyme and something she couldn’t name, something green and old and unhurried. Her boots were too new and slightly rubbing. The group was small, three women at various stages of various upheavals, and the guide, Dr. Margaretha Montagu, had said something so casually devastating as she dropped them off that Sophie had to stop walking to absorb it.

“Your nervous system,” Margaretha had said, gesturing at nothing in particular, or perhaps at everything, “learned to prioritise connection over reality. That wasn’t weakness. That was intelligence. The question now is: what does intelligence look like, from here?”

Sophie had looked at the dusty path ahead, at the oak trees throwing long shadows in the early light, and felt something move in her chest. Not a big, cinematic feeling. Something quieter. Like a door that had been stuck for years, shifting just slightly in its frame.

During the rest of the retreat, walking several hours each morning, gathering in the evenings for what Margaretha called “storytelling circles” sometimes with the Friesian horses standing nearby in the warm dusk like large, opinionated therapists, Sophie began to do something she hadn’t done in decades: she began to notice what she actually wanted.

Not what would be easiest. Not what would cause the least disruption. What she, Sophie Brennan, specifically wanted.

It was terrifying, and then it was funny, and then it was the most natural thing in the world. By day four, she’d told the group about her father. By day five, she’d laughed until she cried about something genuinely absurd, and realised she couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed like that, without first checking whether it was appropriate. By day seven, walking into the village in the late afternoon heat, boots finally broken in and a blister she’d stopped apologising for, she felt, for the first time in as long as she could recall, like herself.

Not a version of herself edited for palatability. Just, herself.

The takeaway, if there is one, is not that a week in France fixes thirty years of nervous system patterning. It doesn’t. What it does, what the combination of movement and nature and honest community and skilled guidance does, is create the conditions under which you can finally hear the question you’ve been drowning out: who are you when there’s no one left to perform for?

Why Does Self-Abandonment Persist, and Why Does It Matter Beyond You?

What Is Actually Happening in Your Nervous System?

Self-abandonment isn’t a mindset problem you can fix with a good affirmation and a planner. It is a nervous system pattern, meaning it operates below the level of conscious choice. When connection has felt unpredictable or conditional, the brain’s threat-detection system, specifically the amygdala and its complex interaction with the vagal nerve, learns to treat relational tension as genuine danger.

In this state, the fawn response, a term coined by trauma therapist Pete Walker to describe the people-pleasing survival strategy, kicks in automatically. You shrink, accommodate, defer, smooth, explain yourself unnecessarily, apologise for having needs, and monitor other people’s emotional states like a satellite dish pointed permanently outward. All of this happens fast, faster than thought.

The cruel irony is that it works, in the short term. Tension dissolves. The other person seems pleased. Your nervous system gets its hit of safety. And so the pattern is reinforced, again and again, until it becomes the default operating system for every relationship you enter.

The longer-term cost is significant. Research (see below) consistently links chronic self-suppression with elevated cortisol, immune dysregulation, anxiety, depression, and a particularly corrosive form of exhaustion that isn’t about sleep deprivation at all. It’s the exhaustion of spending decades being someone else.

Why Major Life Transitions Are Both the Trigger and the Opportunity

Divorce, serious illness, bereavement, career collapse, children leaving home: these aren’t just stressful events. They are structural changes. They remove the scaffolding around which self-abandonment has been quietly organised for years.

When the marriage ends, you are no longer someone’s partner. When the children leave, you are no longer primarily someone’s parent. When the career shifts, the role that came with it, and all the performing-for-approval that role required, disappears too.

This is disorienting. It is also, if you can tolerate the disorientation long enough to look around, an extraordinary opportunity. Because for perhaps the first time in decades, the question of who you actually are, stripped of every performance, every role, every carefully maintained version of yourself, is genuinely open.

As someone who has spent twenty years as a physician working with stress and life change, and nearly fifteen years guiding people through transformational retreats on the Camino, Dr. Margaretha Montagu has watched this moment arrive for hundreds of people. “The transition is painful,” she says. “It’s also, without exception, the most alive people have felt in years. That aliveness is not a coincidence. It’s information.”

The Ripple Effect: Why Your Healing Matters Beyond You

Here is something that doesn’t get said enough: when you stop self-abandoning, the people around you change too.

Not because you’ve “fixed” them, but because the dynamic shifts. When you stop offering bottomless accommodation, relationships have to find a more honest equilibrium. Some of those relationships will flourish. Some won’t survive, which is painful and also, eventually, a relief.

More profoundly: the people who have been unconsciously absorbing your resentment, your exhaustion, your muted frustration, will be affected by its absence. Children of self-abandoning parents often carry an ambient guilt they can’t quite name. Partners often sense, even if they can’t articulate it, that something is being withheld. Friends notice when you become, suddenly and inexplicably, more fully present.

Communities, too, benefit. Women who have reclaimed their own authority, who speak with the confidence of someone who’s stopped editing themselves for palatability, bring a particular quality to their professional lives, their creative work, their civic engagement. It is not a small thing. Authenticity at the individual level has collective consequences.

What Are the 5 Most Common Mistakes When Trying to Break the Cycle?

Mistake 1: Treating it as a Mindset Problem

Repeating “I am allowed to have needs” into a mirror will not rewire a nervous system. Self-abandonment is a body-based, relational pattern. It needs body-based, relational interventions: movement, breath, regulation practices, safe connection. Insight helps. Insight alone is not enough.

Mistake 2: Going to War With the Pattern

Shame and self-criticism are themselves nervous system activators. If you spend your energy being furious with yourself for people-pleasing, you add another layer of threat to an already overloaded system. The work is curious observation, not attack.

Mistake 3: Overcorrecting Into Aggression

The pendulum move from endless accommodation to harsh, blunt “I’m just being honest now” boundary-setting is common and understandable, and it’s still a nervous system response, just a different one. The goal is not to become the person who never accommodates. It’s to become the person who chooses when and why they do.

Mistake 4: Doing It Alone

Self-abandonment developed in relationship. It heals in relationship. The idea that you can fully rewire attachment patterns through solo journaling and meditation, while both are useful, misunderstands the nature of the work. You need safe witnesses. Honest community. People with whom you can practice being seen.

Mistake 5: Waiting Until You Feel Ready

Readiness is a feeling the nervous system promises and never fully delivers. The people who change are, by and large, not the people who felt ready. They’re the people who went anyway, uncomfortable, uncertain, and a little terrified, and discovered that the discomfort was manageable after all.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: The Three Questions

Find somewhere quiet. Sit for a moment without an agenda. Then ask yourself, slowly and without rushing to answer:

What have I been pretending not to mind? (Not in a dramatic sense. Just: what have I been quietly absorbing that I’d rather not?)

What would I do or say today if I trusted that the important connections in my life could survive my honesty?

What is one small act of self-fidelity I can commit to in the next 24 hours? Not a grand gesture. Something real and doable. Saying no to one thing. Saying yes to one thing you actually want.

Write your answers down. Read them back. Notice what feels true versus what feels performed, even in private.

Further Reading: Five Books Worth Your Time on This Subject

1. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker

Walker is the therapist who coined the term ‘fawn response,’ and this book is the clearest, most compassionate account of how people-pleasing develops as a trauma response that exists. Practical, honest, and quietly revolutionary.

2. Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller

An accessible and evidence-based guide to attachment styles and how they shape adult relationships. Particularly useful if you’re trying to understand your own relational patterns in the context of a major life change like divorce.

3. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Essential reading for understanding why self-abandonment can’t be resolved by thinking alone. Van der Kolk’s exploration of how trauma lives in the body is the scientific foundation for any serious approach to nervous system change.

4. Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Tawwab

Nedra Tawwab is a therapist who writes about boundaries with unusual clarity and zero drama. This book is practical, warm, and devoid of the preachy self-help tone that makes so many books in this genre unreadable. Chosen because it bridges the gap between insight and actual application.

5. Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

A different kind of book, mythic, psychological, and deeply female in its orientation. Estes writes about the recovery of the instinctual self with the kind of depth and imagery that the rational brain can’t quite reach. Best read slowly, outdoors if possible.

PS: If you’re looking for a practical, daily companion for this work, my book Embracing Change, in 10 Minutes a Day offers exactly what the title promises: grounded, doable micro-practices for navigating life transitions without losing yourself in them. It reads less like a self-help book and more like a thoughtful conversation with someone who genuinely understands.

A Note on the Purpose Pivot Protocol

The storytelling circle Sophie attended on retreat was working through my Purpose Pivot Protocol, an online course designed specifically for people at major life crossroads who are ready to move from managing change to actively choosing what comes next. It’s available at . Worth exploring if the idea of structured, supported transition work appeals to you, particularly between retreats.

FAQs: What People Are Actually Asking About Self-abandonment Right Now

Is self-abandonment the same as codependency?

They overlap, but they’re not identical. Codependency typically refers to a specific relationship dynamic in which your sense of self becomes enmeshed with someone else’s wellbeing. Self-abandonment is the broader nervous system pattern underneath: the habitual erasure of your own needs, preferences, and emotions in the service of maintaining connection. You can self-abandon in relationships that aren’t classically codependent, in friendships, workplaces, or even in how you relate to your own inner life.

Can you actually change attachment patterns as an adult?

Yes, and the evidence for this is now fairly robust. The concept is called ‘earned secure attachment,’ and it describes the process by which people with insecure attachment histories develop more secure relational patterns through consistent, corrective relational experiences. This can happen in therapy, in close friendships, in certain kinds of community settings, and yes, in immersive retreat experiences where safety, honesty, and sustained reflection are part of the design.

Why does self-abandonment get worse during major life changes?

Because the structures that made it manageable have gone. The role of spouse, parent, or senior professional came with implicit instructions about who to be. When those roles dissolve, the underlying pattern becomes exposed and often intensified, as the nervous system redoubles its efforts to find safety through familiar means. This is why transitions feel so destabilising even for people who, on paper, chose them.

What’s the difference between being kind and self-abandoning?

Genuine kindness is a choice made from a place of relative internal security. Self-abandonment is an automatic response driven by anxiety about connection. The practical test: when you accommodate someone, do you feel freely generous, or do you feel the quiet pressure of having no real alternative? Kindness expands you. Self-abandonment, over time, contracts you.

Do I need therapy, or can I work on this myself?

Therapy, particularly somatic approaches, EMDR, or attachment-focused modalities, can be enormously valuable here. That said, therapy is not the only path. Honest community, skilled coaching, movement-based practices, and immersive experiences that provide both challenge and safety can all create meaningful nervous system change. For many people, the most powerful shifts happen not in a therapy room but in a context that combines physical experience, honest reflection, and genuine connection, which is, not coincidentally, exactly what a well-designed walking retreat provides.

Conclusion: The Person You’ve Been Protecting Them From Is You

The most quietly devastating thing about self-abandonment is not the exhaustion, though there is plenty of that. It’s not even the resentment, which has a way of building behind a pleasant facade like water behind a dam. It’s the slow, steady erosion of your own company. The way you can spend forty, fifty, sixty years on this earth and realise, somewhere in the middle of a life change that nobody asked for, that you’ve never quite introduced yourself, properly, to yourself.

The transition you’re in right now, however unwelcome it felt at the start, is handing you something unusual: the unstructured, raw, slightly terrifying gift of an open question. Who are you, when the old roles have dissolved and the approval you’ve been managing for is no longer available to manage?

That question has an answer. It just needs space, honesty, and the right conditions to emerge.

“You did not abandon yourself in one dramatic moment. You did it in a thousand small accommodations, each one reasonable, each one kind, each one a vote cast, very quietly, for connection over truth. The next chapter is not about learning to be selfish. It’s about learning to be faithful, to the person who has been waiting, quite patiently, to be allowed into the room. Dr. Margaretha Montagu

Ready for a Different Kind of Next Chapter?

You’ve spent long enough making yourself comfortable to be around. The 7-Day Crossroads Camino de Santiago Retreat in the sun-drenched south-west of France is designed for exactly where you are right now: at the crossroads between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming. Walk the ancient Camino trails each morning, let the rhythm of your boots on old earth do what weeks of thinking cannot. Gather in the evenings for storytelling circles alongside Dr. Montagu’s magnificent Friesian horses, because some truths arrive more easily in the presence of creatures who have absolutely no interest in who you used to be. Come as you are. Leave as yourself. Find out more and reserve your place.

Reflection question: If you could send a voice message to the version of yourself who first learned that making yourself smaller kept people closer, what would you want her to know?

References

• Fawning: Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing. (Primary source for fawn response conceptualisation in trauma literature.)
• Attachment: Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change. Guilford Press. (Comprehensive review of adult attachment theory, including insecure attachment and hypervigilance to relational cues.)
• Self-suppression and health: Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348,362.
• Earned secure attachment: Roisman, G. I., Padrón, E., Sroufe, L. A., & Egeland, B. (2002). Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect. Child Development, 73(4), 1204,1219. (Key evidence for plasticity in attachment representations across the lifespan.)
• Fawning and the polyvagal system: Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company. (Foundational text on the vagal nerve’s role in social engagement and threat response.)

Managing Your Cast of Supportive Characters

Article 1 of 10 | Divorced: Bruised-but-not-Broken Series

There is a moment, usually about three weeks into your separation, when you realise something alarming: your divorce no longer belongs to you.

You were busy — sorting out bank accounts, crying in supermarket car parks, googling “can I keep the dog” at 2 am — and while your attention was elsewhere, your extended family quietly convened, elected themselves a crisis committee, and began running the whole operation without you.

Welcome to the Great Divorce Discussion. It is one of the least mentioned, most universally experienced, and frankly most operatically absurd aspects of divorce. Because while everyone focuses on the lawyers, the asset division, and the devastating rewriting of your future, nobody warns you that Aunt Patricia is going to appoint herself Head of Intelligence, your mother is going to accidentally forward your private texts to your brother, and your father-in-law — a man who once spent forty-five minutes at Christmas explaining the plot of a film he had not yet seen — is going to ring you to deliver a verdict on your marriage.

This article is for everyone who has lived through the family divorce discussion extravaganza. The recruiting. The siding. The unsolicited opinions were delivered with the force of papal decrees. The relatives who ring not to check on you but to extract information to relay elsewhere. It is a warm and entirely genuine acknowledgement that dealing with extended family during divorce is, in many ways, harder than dealing with the divorce itself.

And it is also, if you can get just a little bit of distance from it, occasionally very funny.

The Loyalty Network: A Brief and Biased Overview

Every family has a loyalty network. Most of the time, it sits dormant: a kind of emotional infrastructure you don’t notice, like pipes or load-bearing walls. People know whose side they’re on, broadly speaking, but nobody has to act on it because there’s no crisis to activate it.

Divorce activates it.

Within days of separation, the loyalty network springs to life with the energy of a military mobilisation. Calls are made. WhatsApp groups — ones you’re not invited to join — begin to churn with activity. People who haven’t thought about your marriage for years suddenly have very strong feelings about it. Alliances form. Positions are staked. And everyone, without exception, believes they are being entirely reasonable and only wanting what’s best for you.

What makes the loyalty network so exhausting is that it operates on two levels simultaneously. On the surface, everyone is concerned. They are worried about you. They are just trying to help. They are checking in. But underneath, the loyalty system is collecting, categorising and transmitting information with the efficiency of a small intelligence agency — one with terrible operational security and a tendency to CC the wrong people.

The loyalty extraction itself is simple: your relatives want to know what’s happening, who did what to whom, who is the wronged party, and where to place their allegiance. This is human. It is completely understandable. It is also, when you are in the middle of the worst period of your life, absolutely exhausting.

The Cast of Characters

Every divorce produces its own supporting cast, but certain recurring archetypes appear with such regularity that they deserve formal recognition.

First, The Information Broker. This is the family member — often a sibling, sometimes a parent — who has positioned themselves at the centre of the information network. They speak to everyone. They convey messages between parties who are not yet speaking. They brief newcomers. They have heard things, and they want you to know they have heard things, though they will not always say what those things are. The Information Broker means well. They genuinely believe they are helping. They are not helping. They are adding at least three layers of misunderstanding to every communication and enjoying, just a little bit, the sense of importance the role provides.

Then there is The Historian. The Historian has been waiting for this moment. They saw this coming — did they not say, did they not mention, did they not try to tell you back in 2019 that something was not right? The Historian is now available to provide a comprehensive retrospective analysis of everything that led to this point, including incidents you have entirely forgotten and at least one thing that they appear to have made up. The Historian is not malicious. They simply have a deep human need to be right, and your divorce is, for them, a form of vindication.

The Premature Grief Merchant appears next, often clutching something warm to drink. They are heartbroken. More heartbroken, it sometimes seems, than you are. They loved your ex. They cannot believe it has come to this. They keep saying things like “I just keep thinking about the good times” while you are sitting there trying to remember where you put the mortgage documents. The Premature Grief Merchant is mourning on a timeline completely disconnected from yours, and they occasionally make you feel that your own feelings — whatever they are — are the wrong ones.

There is also The Reluctant Spy. This is the relative — your cousin, say, or a sibling-in-law — who is still in contact with your ex, and who you can tell is being pumped for information every time they ring you. The Reluctant Spy is not actually trying to spy. They are in an impossible position and they know it. You can hear it in how carefully they speak, in the slight pause before they answer questions about how things are going, in the way they occasionally say “I can’t really say” and then immediately say it.

And finally, The Well-Meaning Wildcard. This is the family member — an uncle, a grandparent, a cousin you haven’t spoken to in years — who rings out of nowhere to deliver their thoughts. They have a theory about what went wrong. They have advice, largely historical and mostly inapplicable. They once went through something similar, or know someone who did, and they want to tell you about it at some length. They mean absolutely no harm. They are simply doing what humans have always done: reaching toward people in pain and saying whatever comes to mind, regardless of whether it helps.

The Recruitment Drive

One of the stranger experiences of divorce is discovering that someone appears to be running a campaign to get people onto their side — and that person might be you, your ex, or both of you simultaneously, without either of you entirely meaning to.

The recruitment drive is rarely deliberate. Almost nobody sits down and thinks: “I will now systematically lobby my relatives to support my position in this divorce.” What actually happens is subtler and harder to resist. You are in pain. When you are in pain you talk to people you trust. When you talk to people you trust about the pain someone else has caused you, you naturally emphasise the things they did that hurt you. You are not lying. You are not propagandising. You are just telling your story, from your perspective, to people who love you.

The problem is that your ex is doing exactly the same thing, from exactly their perspective, to their people. And within a few weeks, there are two completely different marriages being described in family kitchens across the country, and both descriptions contain enough truth to be convincing and enough omission to be misleading.

What nobody tells you is how unsatisfying the recruitment drive ultimately is. Winning people to your side — and you will, your people will side with you, because that is what people do — doesn’t actually make you feel better. It makes you feel temporarily validated and then, usually quite quickly, trapped. Because now you have an audience. Now there are people who need updates. Now there are relatives who have invested in your narrative and who you have to manage, gently, every time something happens that complicates the story they’ve been told.

The fully-sided relative is not, it turns out, an asset. They are a responsibility.

What It Does to the Children

This is where the warmth and the wit have to pause for a moment, because this part matters a great deal.

Children observe everything. They absorb the temperature of every room they walk into. They notice who whispers when they enter, who asks careful questions, who refers to their other parent in a way that suggests that parent has recently been reclassified. They cannot always name what they are sensing, but they feel it, and they carry it.

When extended family takes sides vigorously — when grandparents make pointed comments, when aunts and uncles become noticeably cool toward one parent, when family gatherings become ideologically charged — children are placed in an impossible bind. They love both their parents. They love both sides of their family. They are not capable of processing, and should not be asked to process, the fact that the adults around them are engaged in a loyalty war.

The research on this is consistent and sobering: children do best in divorce when they are permitted to love both parents without guilt, and when the significant adults in their lives model the possibility of moving forward with dignity. Extended family can either support this or actively undermine it.

The kindest and most difficult thing relatives can do — and some manage it, and they deserve enormous credit — is to keep their opinions about the other parent firmly to themselves when children are present, and sometimes when they are not. To say, if asked, “I know your mum/dad loves you very much.” To resist the temptation of the small dig, the meaningful look, the sigh that speaks volumes.

Children are not referees. They are not comfort objects for the grief of their grandparents. They are people going through something very hard, and they need the adults around them to hold it together, even when holding it together is the last thing anyone feels like doing.

Divorce Information Distribution

Here is a thing that almost nobody who is divorcing realises until it is too late: information shared with family during divorce has a half-life of approximately zero.

This is not because your family is malicious or gossip-hungry (although the odd one might be). It is because divorce is dramatic and significant and the people who love you cannot help discussing it with each other, which means that the thing you told your mother in confidence on Tuesday has been discussed with your aunt by Wednesday, has reached your cousin by Thursday, and has been slightly inaccurately relayed to someone on your ex’s side of the family by the following weekend.

The practical consequence of this is that you should think of anything you tell a family member during divorce as a press release. Not in a cynical way — you need to be able to talk to people, and you should — but with a clear understanding that the information will travel, and that it may travel in a distorted form. Speak carefully. Do not share things that could damage legal proceedings. Do not share things that could reach your children. Do not share things about money, about your ex’s behaviour, about your own behaviour, that you would not be comfortable with a wider audience receiving.

And perhaps most importantly: do not outsource your narrative to people who love you but don’t have full information. The story that gets built in family conversations is almost always simpler, more one-sided, and more emotionally charged than the reality. Living inside that story — being the protagonist of someone else’s version of your divorce — makes it harder, not easier, to see clearly and make good decisions.

When the In-Laws Are the Problem (And When They’re Not)

A special note on in-laws, because they deserve their own consideration.

Your in-laws — particularly if the marriage was long and the relationship was close — are losing something real when it ends. They may be losing a person they genuinely love and will miss. They may be losing a vision of how their family would look in the future. They are almost certainly going to side with their child, because that is what parents do, but that does not mean they are wrong or bad people.

The in-law who is cold to you at a school pick-up, the mother-in-law who has clearly been told a version of events that doesn’t entirely correspond to your own — these people are usually not your enemies. They are frightened people who love their child and are doing what frightened people do, which is rally around and protect.

Where it becomes genuinely problematic is when in-laws take active steps to influence legal proceedings, to interfere in arrangements for children, to poison relationships between children and the departing parent, or to weaponise financial or social power. This is not just painful — it can have real legal and developmental consequences, and if it is happening, it is worth raising with a family lawyer and potentially a family therapist.

But for most in-laws, in most divorces, the answer is not confrontation. It is patience, low expectations, and a firm decision not to take the bait. You do not need to win over your former mother-in-law. You do not need her to understand your side. You need, eventually, to be in the same room with her for school events and milestone occasions, and to do so with sufficient civility that your children do not feel they are watching a standoff. That is enough. That is, frankly, a lot.

What to Actually Do

Having spent considerable time describing the problem, it seems only fair to offer something practical.

The first and most important thing is to identify one or two people — not ten, not a rotating cast — with whom you will actually process the divorce. People who can hold information confidentially. People who will tell you when you’re being unreasonable as well as when you’re not. People who are not so enmeshed in your family system that anything you say will immediately enter the information network. A close friend is often better suited to this role than a family member, for exactly this reason.

The second thing is to give your family a job. Extended family members who feel useful are dramatically less likely to be destructive. Ask your mother to help with childcare on specific days. Ask your brother to be the person who comes over when you need company. Ask your aunt to research family lawyers in your area. People who have tasks are people who feel included without needing to extract information or stake positions.

Third, become comfortable with the phrase “I’d rather not talk about that part.” It sounds simple. It is simple. It is also, somehow, extremely hard to say to people who love you and are looking at you with eyes full of worry and the distinct sense that they are owed information because they care so much. You are allowed to decline to share things. You are allowed to keep parts of your experience private. The loving gaze of a concerned relative is not a legally binding obligation to disclose.

Fourth, and finally: try, when you can, to find it a little bit funny. Not the pain. Not the grief. Not the genuine hardship of what your children are going through. But the sheer operatic absurdity of the cast of characters, the information networks, the competing narratives. The fact that your uncle has opinions. The fact that someone your ex’s mother knows has apparently been telling people something that bears no relationship to anything that actually happened. The elaborate theatre of human loyalty systems is activated around a crisis.

Seen from the right distance, it is kind of extraordinary how much humans do when they love each other and don’t know what else to do.

A Final Word on Being Loved

Most of what extended families do during divorce — the information gathering, the side-taking, the unsolicited opinions, the loyalty rallying — comes from love. Badly deployed love, impractical love, love that makes your life harder rather than easier, love that serves the needs of the person feeling it more than the person it’s directed at. But love.

This doesn’t mean you have to accept all of it graciously. You are allowed to set limits. You are allowed to tell your mother that you need her to stop asking about the settlement. You are allowed to tell your sister that her opinion of your ex is not helpful right now. You are allowed to decline the Historian’s retrospective analysis, the Grief Merchant’s tears, the Wildcard’s theories.

What you might also allow yourself, quietly, is a little gratitude that these imperfect, intrusive, well-meaning people exist. Because the alternative — facing divorce without the noisy, complicated infrastructure of people who love you — is the loneliest war.

They’re infuriating. They mean well. They’re yours. And eventually, when this is over and the dust has settled, many of them will still be there — having mostly forgotten which side they were on, ready to welcome whatever version of your life comes next.

Even Aunt Patricia.

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There’s a certain irony that comes with facing Valentine’s Day as a newly single person. The holiday arrives with its parade of heart-shaped everything, seemingly designed to remind you of what you no longer have. But what if we viewed this moment not as an ending, but as an intermission—a chance to reflect on what truly makes relationships work before your next great love story begins?

The Valentine’s Reality Check

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Perhaps you’ve already seen them—those social media rants from people lamenting partners who will inevitably forget or dismiss the occasion. The comments section overflows with validation: “This happens to me every year too!”

Yet tucked among these grievances are the outliers—those rare commenters who dare suggest their relationships actually thrive. We tend to dismiss these voices as delusional or deceived. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: some relationships really do work well, even if they’re far from perfect.

If your divorce has left you wondering whether fulfilling love is just a fantasy, I have good news. It is genuinely possible to find someone who will love you the way you’ve always yearned to be loved. The key is knowing what to look for—and perhaps more importantly, knowing what you need to bring to the table.

The Partner Worth Waiting For

When you find someone truly compatible, you’ll recognize certain qualities that stand apart from your past relationship patterns. This person won’t just tolerate you—they’ll celebrate you.

They’ll be genuinely proud to be with you, championing your achievements both publicly and privately. They won’t harbour unrealistic expectations of perfection from you or your relationship. Instead, they’ll understand that authentic connection includes embracing each other’s humanity—flaws and all.

Trust forms their foundation, knowing they can depend on you and proving themselves dependable in return. When challenges arise (and they will), this person stands ready to fight for you, defend you when necessary, and support you through difficult seasons.

You’ll notice their gratitude—not just in grand gestures, but in small moments of appreciation for having found you. Your opinions, hopes, and dreams receive genuine respect, even when they differ from theirs. Your imperfections don’t become ammunition during arguments but are met with compassion and forgiveness.

Honesty flows naturally between you. Their commitment to making the relationship work manifests in actions, not just words. When you speak, they truly listen—not just waiting for their turn to talk. What matters to you genuinely matters to them. And perhaps most importantly, their love comes without conditions or contingencies.

The Mirage of Perfection

Let’s address the elephant in the room: there’s no such thing as a perfect partner or relationship. The “happily ever after” narrative that many of us internalized from childhood sets impossible standards. Real relationships—the kind worth investing in—require consistent effort from both parties.

Post-divorce, you have the advantage of experience. You know relationships demand work. The key difference now is recognizing that this work must be equally shared.

Becoming the Partner You Seek

The most transformative insight after divorce might be this: to attract the partner described above, you must embody those same qualities. As the saying goes, we attract what we are, not what we want.

This means cultivating self-love and self-respect equal to what you’ll offer your future partner. It means approaching communication as a skill to be developed, not a talent you’re either born with or without.

You’ll need to accept constructive criticism gracefully while learning to deliver feedback that builds rather than destroys. Control dynamics—whether being controlled or controlling others—have no place in healthy relationships. Understanding and respecting boundaries—both yours and theirs—becomes essential.

Compromise emerges not from self-abandonment but from mutual respect. Forgiveness becomes not just something you give but something you learn to receive. You’ll appreciate your partner for who they are fundamentally, not just what they contribute to your life. And through life’s inevitable challenges, loyalty and support flow naturally.

The Equality Equation

The reason I’ve presented two parallel lists is to emphasize perhaps the most crucial insight about successful relationships: they require equal investment from both partners. As relationship expert Anthony Robbins wisely notes, “Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.”

This perspective represents a fundamental shift from what many experience in unsuccessful marriages. Relationships aren’t transactional scorecards but rather collaborative creations where both partners continually invest.

The Courage to Begin Again

Creating a workable relationship isn’t easy—a fact you know intimately. But having experienced what doesn’t work gives you invaluable wisdom about what does. The pain of divorce, while substantial, offers clarity few other life experiences can provide.

If your previous relationship involved you doing all the heavy lifting despite your best efforts to engage your partner, you’ve learned the most important lesson: no amount of unilateral effort can sustain a relationship meant for two active participants.

Second Chance Valentine

Michael stared at the small velvet box on his kitchen counter, wondering why he hadn’t thrown it away months ago. The divorce papers had been finalized in November, ending fifteen years of what he now recognized as two people living parallel lives rather than one shared journey.

Today marked his first Valentine’s Day alone in nearly two decades. He tucked the old ring box into a drawer—not ready to discard it, not willing to dwell on it either.

His phone buzzed with a text from his daughter: “Happy V-Day, Dad. You doing okay?”

He typed back “All good, sweetheart,” though the truth was more complicated.

The coffee shop three blocks from his new apartment had become his Saturday morning ritual. The barista—Emma, according to her name tag—greeted him with the same warm smile she offered everyone.

“The usual?” she asked, already reaching for a mug.

“Please,” Michael nodded, noticing how the morning light caught the silver in her dark hair.

He settled into his corner table with his laptop, half-heartedly reviewing work emails. At the table beside him, an elderly couple shared a scone, their conversation flowing with the comfortable rhythm of decades together.

The woman caught him watching and smiled. “Fifty-two years,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You were wondering, weren’t you? Fifty-two years married today.”

Her husband chuckled. “And she still hasn’t figured out she could have done better.”

Michael offered congratulations, feeling a pang of something between envy and grief.

“Mind if I ask your secret?” The question escaped before he could reconsider.

The woman’s eyes crinkled. “No secret. Just two imperfect people who decided every morning that today, we choose each other again.”

Her husband reached across the table, covering her hand with his. “And forgiveness,” he added. “Oceans of it.”

Michael nodded politely and returned to his laptop, their words settling into him.

When Emma arrived with a refill, she placed a heart-shaped cookie beside his mug. “On the house,” she said. “We all deserve something sweet today.”

“I’m actually not much for Valentine’s Day anymore,” Michael admitted.

Emma’s smile turned thoughtful. “Neither am I. But I’m trying something new this year—celebrating love in all its forms, not just the romantic kind.”

Hours later, leaving the café, Michael noticed Emma struggling with boxes in the storage room. He paused at the doorway.

“Need a hand?”

Together they reorganized the supply shelves, conversation flowing surprisingly easily about books, travel, and the neighborhood. He learned she was also divorced—three years now—and taught literature at the community college evenings.

“I’m actually headed to the bookstore,” Michael said as they finished. “They’re having a poetry reading. Nothing to do with Valentine’s Day,” he added quickly. “Just a coincidence.”

Emma hesitated, then removed her apron. “My shift just ended. Mind if I join you? I’ve been meaning to check out their poetry section.”

They walked the three blocks in comfortable conversation, occasional snowflakes drifting between them.

“I thought I’d failed,” Michael confessed suddenly. “At marriage. At love in general.”

Emma nodded. “I felt that too. Then I realized my marriage ending wasn’t the final word on my capacity for connection.”

At the bookstore entrance, they paused.

“What changed?” Michael asked.

“I stopped looking for someone to complete my story,” Emma said, “and started writing new chapters of my own.”

Michael held the door open. “I’d like to hear more about those chapters.”

“I’d like that too,” she smiled, stepping inside.

Behind them, the elderly couple from the café walked arm-in-arm down the snowy street, still choosing each other after fifty-two years of imperfect, wonderful togetherness—a quiet reminder that while some love stories end, others are waiting to begin.

A Valentine’s Gift to Yourself

This Valentine’s Day, rather than mourning what was lost, consider giving yourself the gift of possibility. The end of your marriage wasn’t the end of your capacity for love—it was the beginning of your understanding of what love truly requires.

The time between relationships isn’t empty space to be filled as quickly as possible but rather sacred ground for rebuilding yourself. Use this period to reflect on the partner you were and the partner you aspire to become. Develop the qualities you seek in others. Heal the wounds that might otherwise be carried into your next relationship.

When you eventually find someone who embodies the attributes we’ve discussed—and when you’ve developed those same qualities within yourself—you’ll discover a relationship unlike any you’ve experienced before. Not perfect, but perfectly worth the effort.

So this Valentine’s Day, as you navigate life after divorce, remember that your best love story may still be unwritten. The lessons you’ve learned, though painful, have prepared you for a deeper, more authentic connection than previously possible.

The heart that breaks open can contain more love than one that never risked fracture. Your divorce wasn’t the end of your love story—it was simply the closing of one chapter in a book still being written.

How my brain built a new world from fragments of failing vision

I recently read Kim Peek’s story. Bit of a revelation, it was. To me, anyway.

From the moment he was born in Salt Lake City in 1951, doctors urged his parents to place him in an institution. They said he would never walk or speak. But by the age of six, he had memorised the entire Bible. By the time he died, he had committed roughly twelve thousand books to memory. His brain lacked the structure that normally connects its two hemispheres, the corpus callosum, and even today, science cannot fully explain how he did what he did.

What unfolded over the next fifty-eight years quietly dismantled much of what we believe about how the human brain works.

Kim could memorise 12,000 books but couldn’t button his shirt. He could calculate the day of the week for any date in history but couldn’t understand why people shook hands. He could recite entire Shakespeare plays but not switch on a light.

Which of those abilities matters more? Which determines a life’s worth?

The questions themselves reveal how little we truly know.

I’ve thought about Kim Peek often since I read his story, not because our stories are the same, but because they rhyme in a particular way. We are both evidence that the human brain contains mysteries we have not yet mapped. That disability and extraordinary ability can exist in the same person, the same brain, the same life.

Kim’s brain reorganised itself around an absence. Mine has been doing the same thing, more gradually, one operation at a time, one diagnosis after another, over nearly four decades of slowly diminishing light.

The Curtain Descends

I was twenty-five when my eye problems started. A young, ambitious, determined doctor, the world sharp and clear before me. Then came the retinal detachment. Then the keratitis. Then the excruciatingly painful uveitis that felt like someone was driving nails through my skull from the inside out.

Dozens of operations followed, including three corneal transplants. Words like “malignant glaucoma” entered my vocabulary, not as medical terminology to discuss with patients, but as the unwelcome cause of my own deteriorating vision.

I have one artificial eye now. The other looks through what I can only describe as a curtain with holes in it. Imagine trying to see the world through thick lace, except the lace is moving, and the holes keep shifting, and sometimes they disappear altogether.

It eventually became clear that the stress of trying to practice medicine while losing the ability to see was speeding up the disease progression. My body was destroying itself trying to keep up.

I had spent years training to heal people, and now my own body was the patient I couldn’t cure.

What I didn’t know then, what Kim Peek’s parents didn’t know when doctors told them to institutionalise their son, was that the human brain is astonishingly, ruthlessly, unwaveringly stubborn about finding another way.

The Invisible Map

I don’t remember deciding to memorise the layout of my home. Of the hospital where I work. Of the boulangerie where I bought my bread. Of the track I ran every morning. I don’t recall the moment I started building three-dimensional maps in my mind of every building I regularly entered.

These things simply happened.

My brain, confronted with the gradual withdrawal of visual information, quietly began constructing an alternative system. It built a library inside my skull, except instead of books, it stores spatial relationships, distances, textures, sounds, the feel of air currents that tell me I’m approaching a doorway: maps, dozens of maps.

I know my house, my village, my doctor’s office, my friends’ houses, local streets the way Kim Peek knew Shakespeare—every turn, every curb, every place where the pavement buckles just enough to catch an unwary foot. I can navigate my home in complete darkness because darkness and my daily reality aren’t that different anymore.

The counting and map creation are automatic and near instant now. Seventeen steps from the bedroom to the kitchen. Eleven from the front door to the stairs. My brain catalogues these numbers without my conscious participation, the same way your brain knows how to walk without you having to think “left foot, right foot.” I need to navigate a path once, maybe twice, at most three times to know it. As long as nothing changes, I’ll find my way.

I use sound the way other people use sight. The acoustic quality of a room tells me its size. The echo of my footsteps reveals whether I’m approaching a wall or an open space. I’ve become a human sonar system, though significantly less graceful than a dolphin.

And then there are my horses.

A Comedy of Errors (Featuring Horses)

If you want to truly understand the gap between ability and disability, between what I can do and what I struggle with, spend a day watching me care for my horses.

I can sense their moods from the sound of their breathing. I can detect lameness from changes in their gait that I feel through the ground rather than see. I know where each horse is by the distinctive sound of their movement, the particular way each one disturbs the air.

I can also walk directly into a fence post I’ve passed a thousand times because the light was different and the hole in my curtain was in the wrong place.

I’ve put a saddle on backwards. I’ve mistaken a wheelbarrow for a horse (in my defense, it was a very large wheelbarrow and I was having a particularly bad vision day). I once spent five minutes having a lovely conversation with what I thought was my farrier before realising I was talking to a hay bale.

The horses, bless them, have adapted to my limitations. They’ve learned to stand very still when I’m working around them. They’ve learned that when I reach out my hand, I’m not petting them—I’m checking where they are in space. They’ve become my partners in navigation, my guides through a world that keeps shifting under my feet.

Living with them, caring for them, has taught me something profound: competence and incompetence are not opposites. They’re neighbours. They live on the same street.

I am simultaneously capable and helpless, independent and dependent, able and disabled.

Just like Kim Peek could memorise twelve thousand books but needed his father to button his shirt.

Measuring Independence

People ask what “living independently” means for someone with my vision. It’s a fair question with a complicated answer.

I live alone. I care for myself and my horses. I provide for myself financially. I run transformational retreats for people going through major life transitions, which is either supremely ironic or perfectly logical, given that I’ve navigated more life transitions than I care to count. Sometimes several at once.

Lost my career. Lost my vision. Lost the future I thought I was building. Gained new skills. Gained new purpose. Gained a perspective on resilience that you could never learn from textbooks.

But “independent” has brackets, as you can see.

I can navigate my known world with confidence that borders on arrogance. But it is only when I travel, which I do solo mostly because I’m either obstinately brave or utterly foolish (my friends can’t agree which), that I am forced to confront the extent of my disability.

In nearly four decades, I have managed to collect an extensive range of expressive French swear words to cope with these eventualities. And some in a few other languages too.

New environments are foreign languages my brain hasn’t learned yet. I haven’t memorised the steps. I haven’t mapped the spatial relationships. I haven’t catalogued the sounds, smells and textures that would let me move through space with certainty.

So I need assistance. I need someone to tell me where the curb is, where the door is, and whether I’m talking to a person or a potted plant.

The word “nearly” does a lot of heavy lifting in “nearly independent.”

It’s the gap between what I can do in my mapped universe and what I can’t do in unmapped territory. It’s the space where ability and disability become dance partners, constantly switching who leads.

And Then There Is Gratitude

I’m grateful, though. I wake up grateful for every single morning I open my eyes and I can see. Sort of.

Not well. Not clearly. Some mornings barely, if at all. Certainly not the way I used to see, when the world was sharp-edged, three-dimensional and I took every bit of my binocular sight for granted.

But I can “see.”

The gratitude isn’t for the vision I have left. It’s for what my brain has done with that deteriorating vision.

My brain’s flexibility. Its adaptability. Its plasticity. Its absolute refusal to give up. Its uncanny way of finding new solutions to problems.

Every morning, my brain wakes up and gets to work building the world for me from insufficient data. It takes the fragments my eyes can still capture and fills in the rest from memory, from sound, smell, touch, from the proprioceptive sense of where my body is in space.

It does this without requiring any conscious effort. It just does it, the way Kim Peek’s brain memorised books, the way his neural pathways reorganised themselves around the absence of a corpus callosum. Automatically.

Our brains are built to adapt. They’re built to find ways to continue to function when the standard equipment fails.

This is what I’ve learned from living nearly forty years with progressive vision loss: disability doesn’t mean your brain stops working. It means your brain starts working differently.

What Kim Peek Taught Me

Kim, the inspiration for Barry Morrow’s Rain Man, spent the last twenty years of his life travelling, speaking to nearly sixty million people, many of them students with disabilities. He demonstrated that disability and extraordinary ability can exist together.

I think about this when I’m navigating my environment in ways that would seem impossible to someone who doesn’t understand how my brain has remapped my world. I think about it when I’m standing helpless in an unfamiliar airport, needing assistance with tasks that seem absurdly simple to everyone around me.

I am both. Capable and incapable. Independent and dependent. Able and disabled.

Kim Peek died in 2009. Scientists at NASA had studied his brain with the most advanced imaging available, hoping to understand how such cognitive processing could exist without the neural structure most human minds depend on. They found no definitive explanation. He remained an enigma.

Our Portable Libraries

Kim Peek was a living library. He had twelve thousand books in his memory, instantly accessible, perfectly preserved.

I have a different kind of library. Mine is built from spatial relationships and step counts and energy fluctuations and the acoustic properties of rooms. It’s constructed from the memory of how things appeared when I could see them clearly, now translated into other sensory languages.

Every person who lives with disability carries a library like this. We carry the accumulated knowledge of how to navigate a world that wasn’t designed for our particular way of being. We carry the solutions our brains and bodies have invented. We carry the proof that human beings are far more adaptable than our textbooks suggest.

Surviving Contradictions

In Salt Lake City, there was once a library where a man read two pages at the same time with different eyes, absorbing the knowledge of the world while struggling to tie his shoes. Within that contradiction lies a truth we are only beginning to approach.

In my home, there is a woman who can navigate her world with confidence in darkness but needs help in unfamiliar train stations. Who can sense her horses’ moods from breathing patterns but has mistaken a wheelbarrow for a horse. Who lost her medical career but found purpose guiding others through life challenges.

Within that contradiction lies the same truth.

We do not yet fully understand what the human brain can do. We do not yet know what intelligence truly is. We do not yet know how many forms of genius we have mislabeled as disability.

Kim Peek is remembered fifteen years after his death not for what he knew, but for what he revealed about how much we do not know.

And I wake up grateful not for what I can see, but for what my brain has revealed about its capacity to adapt, its ability to find another way forward when the path becomes invisible.