A new labour of love

My world turned upside down in 2006 when I became very unwell and disabled – seemingly out of blue. It turned upside down again (but in a good way) in 2009 when
my gorgeous daughter was born and again in 2012 when I became so ill I was forced to retire from my beloved career in Speech and Language Therapy and follow a different, and at first, very scary path.

Since then, I have learned to live this ‘new’ life and adopt it as my own. It no longer feels as though I’m living someone else’s existence by mistake and that at any moment it will all go back to how it used to be, or should have been. I’m no longer defined by just one aspect of myself – my health.

I’m a person, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a wife, I’m a friend, I’m a sister, I’m a daughter, I’m a business-owner, I’m a chronically ill person; I’m a person with a disability. It’s hard, but I have learned to fulfil all these roles with love for them, others and myself.

This was my first blog post, A new labour of love.