The Dazzle #5

Tears aren't always a bad thing.

A rare smile this week, in Switzerland for work.

I’ve spent a lot of this week crying. There’s no particular reason why I should have found myself continuously bawling like a baby. Nothing bad happened. Actually, lots of good things happened. I went to Switzerland for work, breathed in fresh mountain air, and escaped the chaos of our house renovation in the process. But alone in my hotel room the tears kept pouring out of my eyes, and after a while I decided to stop trying to find reasons for these tears - hormones? Mercury in Retrograde? - and to instead go with them.

It felt good. It felt necessary. Perhaps it was a release of lots of stuff I have stored up over the last few months - I have been writing my next book, which has been quite heavy, and living on a building site, which is kind of chaotic. Taken away from that for a few days, I let it all out. And I kept on thinking of that familiar refrain from childhood, when tears were inevitably met with howls of “don’t cry!” from parents and teachers. Is there a more harmful sentence to say to children? I’m sure there are loads, actually, but you get what I mean. Crying isn’t in itself a bad thing. I definitely feel emotionally lighter today, as if I have released something. Also, I love how tired you feel after a good cry, how cleansed and ready for a lovely sleep you are. That’s the other nice thing: I’ve cried like a baby all week, but I’ve slept like one too.

Here are some other things that felt good this week:

Mental Health Mates for Christmas Over in the All is Well, My Darling community, we have been preparing for Christmas with our ‘festive friend’ initiative. This can be a difficult time of year for so many, so I’ve decided to match make anyone who would like a buddy to check in with over the Christmas period. It’s like going for a Mental Health Mates walk, but online, as it’s also a time when we get scattered across the country and our normal support networks aren’t always available to us. Everyone is very welcome to come and join, you just need to join the community.

Overcoming my fear of heights I’m not that bothered by spiders or enclosed spaces but even THINKING about heights makes my legs turn to jelly. So imagine how chuffed I was when I managed to climb to the top of this wall at a centre in Switzerland (do not ask how I ended up in a climbing centre near Montreux on a Wednesday morning - it’s a story for another time!). A reminder: do the thing you think you can’t!

I can’t believe I did this. I feel dizzy even looking at the picture.

A sausage dog convention This is not a euphemism. I went for a walk with my friend Kat on Tooting Common yesterday, and we passed about 25 sausage dogs wearing Christmas jumpers, all hanging out with their owners. I didn’t take a photo because I was so overcome by emotion, but I hope that knowing it happened gives you a warm feeling in your belly.

A hug from my daughter after 4 nights away from her Just HEAVEN.

Reading The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller First published in 1979 by a Polish-Swiss psychologist, this book about perfectionism and parental expectation is not a light, jolly Christmas read. But it contains so many truths I actually gasped several times while reading it. It might also be part of the reason I’ve been crying a lot, but moving swiftly on…

Prince Harry’s victory in the High Court Many of you know that I count Prince Harry as a friend, but even if I didn’t, I would still think it a very good thing indeed that he took on the sections of the press that made so much of his early life so difficult. On Friday, a judge ruled that his phone had indeed been hacked when he was a young man, and he was awarded £140,600 in damages from the Mirror Group as a result. The money is not the important thing here - for the Duke of Sussex, it is that this widespread criminality has now been denounced by a judge, thus validating his experiences and making a stand for all the many people who feel they have been wronged by old tabloid practices, but who don’t feel able to stand up to a news organisation in the High Court. I wrote this piece about it on Friday. The ruling is not just a victory for truth, but also, I think, for compassion and mental health.

I hope you are having a lovely weekend, and if you’re not - please tell someone about it. Sending so much love,

Bryony xx