This is the first interview for my Self-Centred community, and Alice is my dream firstguest. This 35-minute chat is wide-ranging, covering how she is breaking the mould of societal expectation through lifelong learning, gradual unmasking, and how her life’s mission is to help people overcome shame. Alice talks about how to make space in her busy family and professional life for joyful creativity and a voice for her previously exiled parts.

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Join the conversation by leaving a comment below or in the subscribers’ chat.

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Five o’clock, and the room was already filled with expectation and intention. Another couple sat close by, also marking their anniversary, we were all seated for the earlier, lighter tasting menu and we both got a card wishing us best wishes from the chef.

Carl had managed to get us a table at an unprecedentedly high-end restaurant, and it felt very special to celebrate at Gauthier Soho, eating beautiful food created by a chef whose ethics we’ve long admired. We were presented with seven courses, mostly tiny, four with the option to pair with an alcoholic or non-alcoholic drink. I chose non-alcoholic, Carl had beer. I considered the wine but was entranced by the thought and creativity that had evidently gone into the homemade non-alcoholic options, designed to complement the food with a movie’s worth of thought on what would best combine with what and be experienced when. It didn’t disappoint.

Excuse the shadows on the drinks menu photo above!

The drinks were fascinating and delicious to taste, although, along with the savoury lolly ice to start, added a touch of froideur to an already well air-conditioned room. We had bustled up the stairs to the dining room feeling excited and hot from our walk but I grew a little chilly as the meal progressed, in temperature only. The staff remained approachable and warmly attentive throughout, more than making up for my not having an extra layer to hand. Our table was small enough that we were seated side by side rather than opposite one another – an accident of space rather than design; whoever sat with their back to the room would have been in the servers’ way. But it meant we both faced forward rather than each other, watching the plates arrive and the small and very welcome performance built into each course. We talked less than usual, perhaps because our table had arranged that our primary attention was paid to the meal and the servers. Or perhaps it was just that we were a little in awe of the creativity and deliciousness of the offerings.

Our date, tentatively hatched a week before and arranged by Carl was part of this year’s intent to build space and connection for ourselves as a couple outside of parenting.

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Earlier that day, we had walked from Waterloo to Piccadilly and it had been an a hot walk in heavy human traffic and sensory overload. The usual route closed, we crossed the pedestrian bridge. Finding the internal route at the other end also blocked, we funnelled into narrow diversions made worse by further refurbishment, extensive and simultaneous work on properties and roads, and fellow travellers’ impatience, barging past in both directions. Carl commented as we walked, noting how much the area had changed, how alienating it now felt, the lack of consideration given to people navigating the barriers and seemingly random obstacles created by buildings and roads, all in mid-repair, the pavement never quite where it should be.

The most challenging bit, however, was Trafalgar Square – St George’s flag-waving evangelists preaching over booming speakers on one side, and on the other a protest with a row of nooses, representing the unbearable weight of lives lost under a foreign regime. We flinched as we hurried by. When we finally made it to the museum – hot, flustered and decidedly overstimulated, we were keen to retreat from the heat.

We both felt the stark contrast from the bright sunshine outside to the cool, cave-like low lighting of the exhibition itself where light shined only on each treasure in an otherwise almost gloomy, low-lit room. Seeing the exhibition in person, we understood The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke painting’s true size.

The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke – so much better in real life than in this photo

We’d seen it in our book at home plenty of times but it was only in person that we realised how small the painting is. That the daisies are life-size and the fairies so genuinely tiny, makes their exquisite detail and the apparent weight of their fully-fleshed beings living their lives unseen all the more magical.

Visiting the Richard Dadd, Beyond Bedlam exhibition at the RA was also Carl’s idea. He had already gifted me Dadd well over a decade ago. Reading an early draft of my novel – a magical realist world where fairytale creatures and subjects from my protagonist’s art tangled up with reality in her mental unravelling – he made the association and told me about him. I was inspired, making my protagonist a devotee of his work, looking up to him the way you look up to someone who can guide where you’re heading, albeit blind to the threat. It fit. It might have been a bit on the nose that his name was Dadd and coincidentally she was estranged from her father, but I wasn’t going to be swayed against it for that.

Back outside the museum, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke was reproduced to a vast banner size. I commented on how size reduced its magic, losing what made the real picture extraordinary. I turned to Carl as I spoke but he’d left my side, gaining ground ahead.

A little further on stood a building on the other side of the road whose beauty I don’t remember properly clocking before – ornate stonework, sculpted figures, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours.

Source: Oxyman

I’d been coming to the Royal Academy since childhood, and more recently for the Rose Wylie exhibition with a friend and co-facilitator. I drew Carl’s attention as I was amazed at the artistry and money that had funded that building. It’s unlikely that its equivalent would be made again. I couldn’t get his attention and asked if we could slow down, walk together rather than apart. He turned on me – not loudly, but sharp, already defending himself before I’d finished asking. Later he’d explain he felt responsible, the one meant to know this part of London, adjusting in real time to how much of it he no longer recognised. In the moment, I didn’t intuit the context, I just felt him pull away, and felt something in me pull away in turn – feel less connected, a little sad and a smidge resentful, trailing him through the crowd like a stalker rather than a date. Carl later said he at times felt the same, when I veered away from him.

Later, seated at our restaurant table, we turned our attention from the loving detail in the Still-life with Gooseberries, Raspberries, Red Currants, Spring Onions, a Gherkin and Foliage (geez, what a title! Sounds more like a shopping list but it takes nothing away from the magic of the artwork itself) to the exquisitely crafted menu before us.

Gooseberries, Raspberries, Red Currants, Spring Onions, a Gherkin and Foliage

Reflecting on our day, we both want to visit more galleries together and spend time making food to delight ourselves that we can enjoy with presence around the table. But in terms of connection and closeness, our anniversary date fell a little short of the shared fun at our own kitchen table just the week before when we trialled the arts-based prompts for the forthcoming week’s Wednesday Write Together. It had started out a bit bumpy with Carl wanting the structure held exactly as promised, no shifting the prompts partway – needing to know where he stood before he could let go into it. Tricky when this was my trial process and was still working it out. Once he got in flow, painting his mother, then writing from it, he arrived somewhere unguarded – memories surfacing he hadn’t expected. And I had a very scrappy expressive sketch of my whirling dervish of a daughter with the following accompanying poem:

Ten minutes, done in fits and starts between explaining the exercise to Carl, holding space for what was emerging for him and coming back to my own page — the painting makes sense to no one but me and that’s fine.

She’s a whirlwind, her drive, her passion, the hunger to learn

exploring multiple paths – who she is, what she believes

part of her wants to know the end of the story before she writes it

a romantic seeker, she embraces each moment

Exploring multiple paths – who she is, what she believes

in nature, getting to know her own, and others’

a romantic seeker, she embraces each moment

nestled among mountains of books, she likes to collect, read and re-read

In nature, getting to know her own, and others’

part of her wants to know the end of the story before she writes it

nestled among mountains of books, she likes to collect, read and re-read

she’s a whirlwind, her drive, her passion, the hunger to learn

We had laughed when caught playing with paint and writing for fun in the kitchen that morning, by the very same daughter I’d been writing about. And we both cried a little too – me when I read my daughter the poem, Carl when he read his about his mum.

We felt close then, heard by each other, connected and happily fulfilled at creating art – in the loosest possible terms, for our wellbeing.

Good intentions can often bear fruit but not always as perfectly as Dadd’s berries and Gauthier’s dishes. More reliably, it’s the quality of attention and attunement – to ourselves and each other – that seems to make the real difference. We'd found it the week before, at our own kitchen table – more than the one we'd planned for – and we'll find it again, hopefully today.

The fun and often poignant connections we’ve been building in our creativity-fuelled Wednesday Write Togethers over this past month continue. August’s workshops are designed to celebrate summer and use the joy music awakens in us to inspire our voice on and off the page.

From using music to foster forgotten parts of yourself to painting how music makes us feel – we've four writing sessions that harness summertime vibes and music to inspire your writing and foster feelings of summer fun and wellbeing.

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5th August – Virtual Holiday Conjuring Summertime Dreams
A virtual mixtape of the songs that gets you in the holiday mood, we will create the holiday of our dreams and give it a song title too.

12th August – Finding Forgotten Parts Through Music
Explore how different music makes you feel and actively foster a forgotten part of yourself you’re ready to nurture.

19th August – Let’s Dance
Grab a favourite tune that makes you want to dance, let’s make lyrics David Bowie style. Psst, no need to be a musician (I'm certainly not!). It's a human right to enjoy music however feels good to you.

Additional equipment: Sheets of paper ready to write on and tear up. Optionally some glue and scissors.

26th August – Painting How Music Makes Us Feel
Ever felt a colour when you hear a song, or a texture when you see a shade of blue? That's synaesthesia – a real cross-wiring of the senses, more common among neurodivergent folk (although sadly not me). Whether you naturally create these associations or not, we'll spend this session fostering cross-sensory connections together.

Additional equipment: Useful to have watercolours handy, but any colouring pens and pencils will do.

Join on Zoom
Free throughout August. No writing experience necessary.

From September, Wednesday Write-Togethers become part of a paid community offering – lock in the introductory rate of £9/month now for weekly sessions, a nurturing space to write in, and compassion-building articles. Find out more

Can’t make it live?
Prompts go into the subscribers’ chat after each session – so you can write in your own time, share if you want to, and see what others are making.

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Self-Centring isn’t about selfishness. It’s what happens when you stop being so relentlessly available to everyone else that you end up disappearing from your own life. If you’ve spent years trying to anticipate everyone’s needs and losing yourself in the process, this was built with you in mind.

I’m Kate – creative wellbeing practitioner specialising in therapeutic writing, founder of Compassion Journalling, still unlearning a lifetime of over-giving.

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What this IS

A warm, nurturing, creative community – writing and reflection, alone and together – that helps you build self-trust on and off the page. It’s not therapy, and it’s definitely not another thing to get right. Just a regular practice of coming home to yourself.

What’s free

Personal essays from lived experience

Late-diagnosed neurodivergence, the mess of actually living what I teach

Creative Wellbeing concepts and tools explained
The psychotherapeutic and philosophical ideas that underpin the work. Compassion-Focused Therapy, Kristin Neff’s self-compassion research, therapeutic writing practice and more – illustrated through lived experience, mine and (anonymised) participants’, with adaptable tools you can make your own.

Writing for wellbeing invitations

Wednesday Write Together offers weekly guided writing, 5:30–6:30pm UK time, open to everyone over the summer. No writing experience needed, just curiosity.

Community Events and Newsletter

A monthly roundup of what’s on, how to get involved, and a little of what I’m up to in my own practice

From September

Live sessions and chat move to paid membership, alongside two new spaces I am trialling, starting with Compassion Circles.

Wednesday Write Together is up and running – I’d love you to join. More about the monthly Compassion Circles here.

Pricing, what’s coming, and a little more about me →

If something here lands, I’d love to know – hit reply, leave a comment, or subscribe. The essays stay free for everyone; hearing from you is how I know they’re landing, and it’s what keeps me writing them.

Join Kate Poll’s subscriber chat

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Last Wednesday, between the carers’ course and the write-together, I had an hour to myself. Just as I was toying between browsing Substack, the memoir I’m reading and YouTube, an email from the financial advisor landed: the hiked mortgage rate we’d been offered on our renewal was going to rise again tomorrow. We had to decide now.

[Now, I’m aware “my mortgage renewal went up” is not the most universally relatable crisis going – I don’t expect any sympathy for the rising costs from having a mortgage to renew. But it’s the specific terror I’ve got to hand this week and I can get terrified by the responsibility of managing the rising costs of living. My nervous system doesn’t do proportion.]

I scrambled to assure him we’d take the option on the table, and to assemble everything he needed to secure it. I knew, logically, that no one was going to give me only a thirty-minute window to find the right documents and get them sent. And yet that’s not how it felt in that moment. I felt totally exposed and incompetent. The adrenaline that coursed through me whilst scrabbling to find everything was like tigers were chasing me. The tension in my body as I typed, searched and double-checked facts and figures became more and more vice-like in its grip. I was still and externally just likely just looked focused, but inside I was at the bottom of a cobra den – squeezed to the shallowest breathing, barely able to acknowledge family stopping to talk to me as they passed.

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Here’s the contradiction I sat with afterwards: I created Compassion Journalling – two-pen dialogue is the foundational practice that gives it its name, though the course itself is really a set of embodied tools for meeting people wherever their capacity happens to be. And last Wednesday, two-pen dialogue isn’t what I reached for.

It wasn’t that I abandoned my own method. Two-pen dialogue – writing as myself, then writing back fostering a compassionate voice – is a thinking and feeling practice, and the thinking part wasn’t available. I’d had a full day already – travel, facilitating a community group, prep – and needed to be cognitively fresh for that evening’s write-together. I was too activated to write out the mess, let alone make space for my wise compassionate voice to emerge.

So instead I did what I’d taught the carers group a few hours earlier. One of them had said he sometimes can’t sleep, and asked for something that didn’t need much thinking, for the nights that journalling feels out of reach. I’d shown them a form of doodling that mirrors the shift from threat to soothe state. No words, no dialogue, just colouring pens or pencils moving without needing much executive function to guide it.

The next day, Thursday, a conveyancer emailed asking for information I didn’t have easily to hand. I knew, logically, this was no life-or-death emergency, and no one expected me to produce the documentation and figures like a rabbit out of a hat. But I didn’t trust my own organisational skills to find it in whatever time they’d allow. Not knowing how long it would take, the rest of my to-do list vanished. I became hyperfocused on finding everything asked for. I was back in the cobra pit.

I didn’t keep drilling down this time. After an hour, I peeled myself from the screen and went to yoga as planned. I am not claiming to have nailed self-care – but I now understand enough about my own capacity and neurodivergence to know that if I already needed the regulating effects of yoga, I needed it even more so that day. I trusted I’d find more clarity for the admin I have little confidence in at the best of times once fresh and back in my body. Drilling down while stuck in emergency mode, I just chase my tail.

I’m reminded that developing Compassion Journalling was never about handing people a catch-all tool. It’s about learning to sit with discomfort rather than shy away from it – leaning into the difficult feelings and saying tell me more to the peak anxiety and body alarm bells, rather than censoring, shaming, or stonewalling it with distraction or numbing consumption. Listening for what’s actually at the heart of it offers the ladder out.

When I do that, I can start to assess the real threat level – why I plummet into a metaphorical cobra pit in the first place. More aware of my surroundings, I can see that I’m physically safe, sitting on a comfortable sofa with my laptop. I’m better able to see myself and my situation more objectively, and not reduce myself to a punitive judgement, smothered and rendered helpless with shame.

The truth I am finding: when we kick ourselves extra hard for good measure – to reassure ourselves we’re self-aware, that we’re not letting ourselves off the hook – we in fact are letting ourselves off the hook. Self-flagellation feels like accountability, but it’s a way of avoiding the calmer, harder work of actually mapping out a solution, of assessing what happened and what’s genuinely ours to take responsibility for – past, present and future.

The stories we carry can be fucking bullies. Their strength is that they often carry at least some truth. Their stranglehold is that we silence them before they’re forced to expose the limits of that truth – so we never question them and reframe when necessary.

When we can see ourselves with clarity, we can keep perspective and take the responsibility that’s ours to own. Self-centring is better adulting that’s neither self-condemnation nor catastrophising.

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Share Self-Centred

For every subscriber
I’ll write regular essays on themes central to compassion-focused creative wellbeing that you to can read and engage with in your own time.

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For subscribers wanting to practise these tools live and in greater depth
The Compassion Circle is a small, confidential group session for Self-Centred community members. Made up of course graduates, self-study participants and subscribers who have read the month's theme and want to go deeper. It offers regular practice space to customise the compassion journalling tools to suit your individual life and needs.

How it works

Monthly live session, 90 minutes. Date and time now confirmed as 3rd Tuesday of each month, 7–8.30pm BST. First session: 15th September. Please pop it in your diaries and R.S.V.P. to receive the Zoom link.

One topic at a time – slower pace, with plenty of support and opportunities to share.

Small group by design – intimacy is part of what makes it work.

Community framework

Members hold confidentiality, mutual respect, and kindness. Sharing is invitational, never required. Attentive listening to ourselves and others is the only ask.

Ensuring it’s a good fit

Because this group sits on the therapeutic end of the writing-for-wellbeing spectrum, it’s invitation-only rather than open registration. If you’ve read a month’s theme and would like to join us to go deeper, email me at kate@self-centred.com for a quick chat to ensure it’s a good fit for you.

A self-study version – until now only available through Athabasca’s MA Writing the Self programme – will be available to purchase later this year.

This isn't therapy. If you think you need more personalised support, please reach out to a counsellor or your GP.

Any questions, please get in touch.

Warmest wishes, Kate

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Wisdom Tree I – Zhou Song, Maddox Gallery

From ekphrasis to surrealism to abstract watercolour – four writing sessions that use visual art as a doorway into your own writing and experience.

No art or writing experience necessary. Just curiosity and a pen (with an opportunity for a little abstract painting for those who fancy it).

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During my recent trip to Brighton, we were impressed with the varied exhibits at Brighton Museum. These examples were chosen as prompts to inspire the attendees who attended.

8th July – Home and Away (already happened)
Inspired by Caleb Parkin’s ekphrastic writing prompt, we took inspiration from art around us – and made something new from it.

Missed it? The prompts are in the subscribers’ chat – have a go in your own time and share how you’ve got on.

15th July – The Pictures that Shape Us
Getting curious about the part art has played in our own story – favourite images from childhood, memories of making, and the art that's stayed with us without us quite knowing why.

22nd July – Surrealist Poetry Play
Inspired by Salvador Dalí and playful prompts from Carol Ann Duffy and Kate Clanchy, we’ll tap into our subconscious to create fresh associations and surprising imagery – bringing both your rational adult self and your five-year-old’s instincts to the page.

Please have four sheets of A4 ready to tear up and write on.

29th July – Painting a Poem
Exploring metaphor and a little guided abstract painting (no experience necessary), we’ll write a poem about someone we know well.

If you’d like to have watercolours or paints handy, now’s the time to dig them out – though paper and pen work too.

Join on Zoom
Free throughout July and August. No writing experience necessary. Come as you are.

From September, Wednesday Write-Togethers become part of a paid community offering.

Can’t make it live?
Prompts go into the subscribers’ chat after each session – so you can write in your own time, share if you want to, and see what others are making.

Join the chat →

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Loved it so much I bought it

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People are writing and sharing in the subscribers’ chat – returning the next day with more, inspired by what surfaced in the session. One community member has started writing and publishing on Substack, bringing the self-compassion work directly into their writing life. Quietly, in their own way, becoming more self-centred – more attuned to their own value, what they need and want to say.

That’s what this space is for. And summer feels like the perfect moment to mark it, look ahead at what’s coming, and invite you more fully in.

What’s been happening – June Write-Togethers

Each Wednesday this month, a small group of us have met to write. Here’s a glimpse of what we’ve explored:

Writing We Love – We turned our reflections on the writing that moves us into a found poem together. A few lines from what emerged:

I find myself rejoicing and free
every morning a new guest
Beauty begins with silence
A permission slip to be fully and authentically myself.*

*Full poem in subscribers chat.

Creative Talismans – We explored the objects, images and words that anchor us to our creative practice. Not luck. Perseverance. Trust in your own voice.

Boys Will Be Boys – We read Jessica Urlichs’ poem that breathes new life into a phrase we all know, and wrote into whatever part of it spoke to us. For anyone who has ever been told – or told themselves – what they are, and what that means.

Channelling Cool – With a heatwave bearing down, we used our imagination and attention to find cool. We wrote ourselves to the edge of cold water, felt the heat on our skin, and discovered what the body knows about the other side of courage.

It worked! Your writing was so evocative and beautiful and, YES, cooling!

If any of this makes you wish you’d been there – you’re warmly welcome. From 8th July, sessions run live every Wednesday. Next week, I’ll post a written prompt in the subscribers’ chat – write in your own time, share if you’d like to.

Over the summer

Beach photos by Sophie Poll-Hulshoff. We look forward to joining her next week!

Wednesday Write-Together continues every week through July and August – Wednesdays, 5:30–6:30 pm UK time.

Over the summer I’ll also be publishing pieces on two offerings I’m developing for September:

Commute to Health – a framework I’m finding genuinely useful for building sustainable movement into daily life, without the demand-energy or fear-driven shame. I’m trialling it as a live shared space: creative, reflective, sometimes collaborative – exploring and refining the whys that make habits feel affirming rather than punishing.

Compassion Circles – a live space of support and continued practice for past and present Compassion Journalling students.

More on each soon.

From September – a paid community

From September, Wednesday Write-Together will become part of a paid subscriber offering.

I’ve kept it free while the community found its feet. It felt right. But the sessions are facilitated – carefully, weekly, with intention – and building something sustainable means that needs to change.

Here’s what I’m currently building toward – a growing offering that will evolve with the community:

• Weekly Wednesday Write-Together – live on Zoom, with prompts posted in the subscribers’ chat for those who can’t make it

• Monthly live sessions – launching with Commute to Health and Compassion Circles, developing in response to your requests and needs

• Full archive access and a dedicated subscribers’ chat

The price: £9 per month.

This is an introductory price – reflecting where we are right now, and what I want this community to be: accessible, genuine, and worth your time. I’ll be reviewing it later in the year, in conversation with you.

This price is guaranteed now until the end of September.

If you’d like to lock in this price for a full year, an annual membership is currently available at £90 – working out at £7.50 per month for weekly Write-Together sessions, community holding, and live monthly sessions combined.

To put it in context: a single 90-minute workshop of this kind typically costs £16–35. A monthly subscription gives you weekly sessions, live community spaces, and a growing archive of writing for wellbeing resources.

Before I shape September’s offering – I’d love to hear from you

Three quick questions. Your answers will directly shape what I build.

To reply in more detail and let me know what you would like more of, email me or message the subscriber chat.

One more thing

The interview with Alice Bramhill I mentioned in the June newsletter is postponed – she’s scaling back to take some well-earned rest. We’ll reschedule when the time is right, and I’m looking forward to sharing that conversation with you.

Wednesday Write-Together – Wednesdays, 5:30–6:30 pm UK time Zoom. Recurring Zoom link 8th July - 19th August: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89578861993?pwd=dXNHcOSjSB87o246QR69Pfctp23N4A.1 | Passcode: 252085 |
Room opens 5:25 pm

If you’d rather not receive newsletter updates in your inbox, you can manage your preferences by clicking ‘Unsubscribe’ at the bottom of any email from this publication and choosing which sections to keep – or via Substack Settings under Subscriptions. Any problems, just let me know.

Please pass this on to anybody you know who might enjoy it.
Word of mouth is everything at this stage.

The first Christmas I spent back in England after my marriage ended, I sat in front of the mirror and didn’t recognise my own face. Not in a dramatic way – no breakdown, no tears. Just a strange blankness. The make-up I’d applied automatically for nearly two decades suddenly made no sense. I didn’t know where to start.

I wasn’t seeking comfort. I was seeking function. What moved me to finally ask for help wasn’t the mirror moment, or the marriage ending, or even the continent I’d crossed with a small child and a determination to make everything fine. It was my daughter picking up my pint of vodka orange one day – assuming it was juice – and taking a sip.

I wasn’t falling apart visibly, I was falling apart invisibly, and I’d got so good at it I hadn’t noticed how threadbare I had become.

What followed was a long and twisty 18 years: Functional Neurological Disorder, a false bipolar diagnosis, years of being offered frameworks I tried hard to make fit. What I didn’t have – and couldn’t have imagined needing – was any understanding of the emotional systems running me. At the time, they felt unknowable and deeply threatening. My sole interest in my emotional states was keeping them in check.

The me then would have felt humiliated and shamed at even the idea of treating myself with compassion. I equated self-love with narcissism and self-delusion – at least for myself – and was driven by proving to myself and others that I was the antithesis of that.

The Three Systems

Paul Gilbert’s Compassion Focused Therapy identifies three emotional regulation systems. I’m sharing them here because understanding them helped change how I relate to myself. They form one of the foundations of the Compassion Journalling course I created.

All three systems are necessary. None is the enemy. But they can fall badly out of balance – and when they do, we tend not to notice, because the imbalance becomes the status quo and feels part of our character.

🔴 Threat System – Protection & Safety
Emotions: anxiety, anger, fear, disgust
Body: tense, racing heart, shallow breathing, tight chest
Thoughts: scanning for danger, worst-case scenarios
Purpose: fight, flight, freeze, fawn

🔵 Drive System – Achievement & Progress
Emotions: excitement, determination, striving
Body: energised, focused, activated, forward-leaning
Thoughts: planning, comparing, pursuing goals
Purpose: achieving, acquiring, never enough

🟢 Soothing System – Rest & Connection
Emotions: contentment, calm, safety, care
Body: relaxed, warm, settled, gentle breathing
Thoughts: present-moment awareness, kindness
Purpose: self-nurture, psychological resilience

Looking back, I can see exactly how my systems were running. Threat was the engine underneath everything – not the dramatic, visible kind, but the low-level hum of don’t expose yourself, don’t drop the ball, don’t do anything that might impair your ability to mother, to be enough, to keep the people you love close. It was a full-time surveillance operation, and I was both perpetually watched and on guard.

Drive sat on top of it, performing. Perfect mother. Perfect daughter. Perfect employee. Enough – but not too much. Capable, unflappable, the person others could lean on. Drive felt like the solution to Threat. If I just kept achieving, kept overdelivering, kept being useful, I’d be okay.

Soothing barely existed. Or rather: it felt dangerous. What I thought was self-soothing was more stonewalling – shutting myself up with food and alcohol, driving myself to exhaustion where I could conk out for a few hours rather than glide into restful sleep.

Being truly known wasn’t even a desire. Not even by myself. Hidden trauma and neurodivergence lurked, misunderstood as monsters to be guarded against. What was soothing system suppression, I called coping, adulting, being good.

With no robust soothing system, the threat system was in overdrive, the drive pushed to physical and psychological breaking point. Without any regulation, there was no real rest, no coming home to yourself.

A Practice: Visual Mapping

This exercise comes from my Compassion Journalling course. It takes ten minutes and asks nothing other than a little honest noticing.

Draw three circles or shapes – one for each system. Use size, colour, or imagery to show which feels most active in you right now. Some people draw Threat as jagged red lines, Drive as forward-pointing arrows, Soothing as soft green curves. There’s no right way. Let your hand decide.

Then sit with what you’ve drawn.

Which system is doing most of the work right now? Which is barely present? What would it take – even slightly – to bring a little more soothing to the fore?

If you feel activated while doing this: try grounding. Notice five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste.

Please note: this isn’t about eliminating Threat or Drive. Both have their place. The practice is learning to restore Soothing when we need it – not judging ourselves for having the other two.

What Changed

ADHD diagnosis gave me a framework that finally made sense. And somewhere in the process of understanding my neurology, I found I could extend that same curiosity – gently, slowly – to my emotional systems too.

Self-compassion wasn’t the first thing I reached for. It was the last thing left after other things hadn’t worked. And even then, I came to it sideways – through writing, through the two-pen dialogue I developed to help me hear my own voice without flinching.

The misconception I held longest was ‘I don’t deserve it.’ ‘I don’t need it’ came a close second. I had Drive. I had performance. I had function. What would sekf-nurture add, except risk and self-delusion?

What it added, it turns out, was the ability to thrive, not just survive.

I’ll write more about what it actually took to move from Threat to Soothe – the full journey, the mess of it, what broke and what didn’t – a longer story for another time.

For now: which system is most alive in you today?

My Compassion Journalling course – a four-week facilitated programme and six-week self-study version – is grounded in CFT, Kristin Neff’s self-compassion research, and therapeutic writing practice. If this resonates, you can find out more at katepoll.co.uk. For more about CFT, here’s a video and book worth exploring:

Gilbert, P. (2013) The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life Challenges. 3^rd edn. London: Robinson.

The Three Circles of CFT (YouTube)

I find myself rejoicing and free

every morning a new guest
The moments when two people smile and their hearts join in
The geese turn into the light again
delight in a mother’s rebelliousness

The moments when two people smile and their hearts join in
Beauty begins with silence
delight in a mother’s rebelliousness
A windswept elemental place, demanding a response 

Beauty begins with silence
You may be alone but you are one with the substance of the place
A windswept elemental place, demanding a response 
remembering my inner strength

You may be alone but you are one with the substance of the place
A permission slip to be fully and authentically myself.
remembering my inner strength
every morning a new guest

We created this together at last Wednesday’s Write Together. We each bought a piece of writing we love and wrote about its meaning to us. We then offered up lines to contribute to the collaborative poem above. Not something anyone had to write alone and not dependent on level of writing experience. Some of us are poets, others of us might rarely put pen to paper. I’ve had the privilege of weaving collaborative poems with many and diverse groups – some participants professional writers, others partially literate. Each with a love for words that gave birth to a unique poem woven from that day’s voices combined.

Expertise is not necessary for a meaningful experience, just a held space that feels safe to share authentic feelings and believe that your individual and collective voices matters. Genuine connections emerge.

A brief history of Pantun

Pantoum is a poetic form inspired by the pantun, a traditional Malay oral poetry form dating back to at least the 15th century. Originally created as ‘sastera rakyat’ – literature of the masses, pantun was woven into daily life for sharing wisdom, emotions, and connection.

The Western ‘pantoum’ adapted from the ‘pantun berkait’ (linked pantun), but traditional pantun had a different structure: the first two lines (sampiran) set context, while the final two lines (isi) carry the main message. They were meant to be interactive, often improvised in conversation.

We’re borrowing the interconnected structure to weave our voices together, while acknowledging this beautiful form comes from the rich oral tradition of the Malay archipelago.

In writing this, I explored the traditional pantun in more detail:

The Malay Heritage Foundation – traditional Pantun both in their original Malay and in translation: https://mhf.org.sg/poetry/, bahasainterpreter.com and Pantun Baba Chan: The Art and Beauty of Traditional Baba Malay Poetry by Chan. It includes bilingual texts with online audio recordings in both English and Baba Malay.

I now look forward to exploring pantun in its more traditional form too. Maybe you'll join us at our next session.

Wednesday Write Together You are warmly welcome to join us. Find out more here, or come straight to the weekly Zoom.

Join the session: https://us06web.zoom.us/s/89578861993?pwd=dXNHcOSjSB87o246QR69Pfctp23N4A.1 Passcode: 252085

Contributors – you are welcome to include your name and Substack links below, as well as information about the texts which inspired you.

Leave a comment

I’m working out the shape of my Commute to Health offering starting September, an integrap part of living my practice to be body-self-centred in community.

How about you? Would you enjoy a dedicated time and space where I support you on your wellness journey, and do that in motion? Not as a guru - by any stretch! – but as a fellow traveller.

Perhaps you would join me, moving your body during those sessions too. In whatever way feels comfortable and doable. Or watch them on replay at a time that suits you.

Let me know your thoughts!

Get more from Kate Poll in the Substack app

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After a few tentative first steps, a fledgling community is beginning to grow and I’m very grateful for the connections we’ve already made. Thank you to everyone who attended the Embodied Lovingkindness & Compassionate Body Dialogue Workshop and, my latest offering, the weekly Wednesday Write Together. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you.

Now feels like a good moment to introduce a monthly newsletter. Here’s what’s happening in June, along with a few thoughts about how I hope to develop this community — and what I’d love to hear from you.

A quick note: everything below takes place across the first three weeks of June, as I’ll be on leave during the final week.

Compassion Journalling – 4-week course

The next course starts Tuesday 2 June, 7–9 pm UK time. Across four weekly sessions, we’ll use two-pen dialogue, visual mapping, poetry, and mindfulness to help you develop your compassionate voice and build self-trust. The course draws from Compassion Focused Therapy and is grounded in therapeutic writing practice.

One bursary place is available. There’s no means testing — simply tell me why the course speaks to you. Please check that you’re available for all four Tuesdays before applying.

Register your interest below or email me at kate@self-centred.com.

Full details here. Please share with anyone who might need it.

Wednesday Write-Together

Wednesdays, 5:30–6:30 pm UK time, on Zoom.

An hour of guided reflective writing and creative play. I offer prompts, space, and silence — no performance required.

We’ve had two sessions so far, and the feedback from those who've found it valuable has meant a great deal.

If you’re reading this and wondering whether to try it, you are warmly welcome to join us. Full details here.

Please note: in June, sessions will run during weeks one, two, and three. I’ll also be sharing a piece on expressive writing and creative health — exploring some of the research behind why spaces like this can matter.

Interviewing the wonderful Alice Bramhill

I’m looking forward to interviewing the warm, funny and inspirational Alice Bramhill. An interpersonal psychotherapist, therapeutic coach, registered mental health nurse, writer, artist, and unschooling parent to two neurodivergent children. We’ll be talking about how her career and life experience led to her being diagnosed with ADHD at 47 and Autism at 50 and how her experience informs the thriving community she has created here on Substack. Find out more here.

What would you like more of?

I’ve been sitting with a piece about the three emotional systems from Compassion Focused Therapy — threat, drive, and soothe — and how understanding them helps me manage my energy, maintain boundaries and build self-trust. It’s an integral part of Compassion Journalling I'd like to share it with those of you who haven't yet taken the course – it'll come when it's ready.

I'm also considering a second space within the Self-Centred community: Commute to Health. A framing I find genuinely useful for building sustainable movement into daily life – likely launching this September. If supporting your physical as well as psychological wellbeing feels relevant to you, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

In the meantime, is there something you’d love me to write about or explore in a workshop? A question you keep returning to, or something from the sessions that has stayed with you? Drop a comment or send me a message – I read everything. This community is still finding its shape and your voice is helping to shape it.

And if any of this feels right for someone you know, please pass it on. Word of mouth means a great deal at this stage.

Zoom Room opens at 5.25pm to allow you to get settled before it starts.

I offer prompts and we write alongside each other – in silence, cameras optional, no performance required. Some weeks I’ll bring a full session with the opportunity for shared writing. Some weeks I’ll offer something light. You can follow what I offer or write on whatever is most alive to you.

Sharing is always optional. This isn’t a workshop where there’s pressure to produce something, it’s just an opportunity to try new forms and create work individually and in community How much you engage during the hour, is up to you.

How we hold space for each other

By joining a Write-Together session, we’re all agreeing to treat each other – and ourselves – follow the – CARES framework:

Creativity & Confidentiality – What’s written and shared in the room stays in the room unless otherwise agreed

Active listening – True presence as a gift – to ourselves and each other.

Respect – Kindness, always.

Equality – Equal right to a voice and to be taken seriously as a writer.

Sharing & self-care – Sharing is always optional – feel free to pass, no    questions asked.

You choose how much or little you write and share any given week. Consider yourself invited – you are warmly welcome. Free to join.

Wednesdays, 5:30 pm UK. 5.30-6.30 pm UK time (BST) Recurring Zoom link. You are warmly welcome. Free to join.

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89578861993?pwd=dXNHcOSjSB87o246QR69Pfctp23N4A.1

Meeting ID: 895 7886 1993

Passcode: 252085

If you find it easier to be kind to others than to yourself, the abundant research (and my own lived experience) shows you are not alone. Drawing from Compassion Focused Therapy and Kristen Neff’s self-compassion research, the course offers creative and reflective tools to respond differently to underlying fears of self-criticism, complacency and other common barriers to self-compassion, gently challenging these internalised voices and ‘truths’ with curiosity, care, congruence and clarity.

Over four sessions you’ll begin to develop a different relationship with your inner critic, explore what drives your responses to yourself and others, and build a sustainable self-compassion practice that’s genuinely yours.

Each participant receives a 58-page companion guide, weekly trackers, and resources for ongoing practice.

Graduates are invited to continue deepening their practice through monthly Compassion Circles.

A structured and flexible course exploring self-compassion through creative writing, embodied practice, and psychological frameworks:

You'll Explore
Week 1 – Foundation and attuned listening
Week 2 – Developing your compassionate voice
Week 3 – Fierce compassion and self-nurture
Week 4 – Integration and sustaining practice

🔗 Full Course Outline (click to download)

What's Included

• Four live sessions via Zoom
  (link sent the day before the course begins)

• A 58-page Compassion Journal Companion to support your practice beyond the course

• Between session chat for in-between session support

• Invitation to monthly Compassion Circles for graduates

What Participants Say
"I came away feeling lighter and much more aware of the need for compassion to be present in my life – for me. I also loved writing the joint pantoum with our small and lovely group."
– Alexandra Harrington

"The way you listen and engage with us is so warm. You're very skilled at taking what we say, honouring our truth and adapting it to suit the rest of the group, while still honouring what each person said."
– Saskia

More testimonials→

Upcoming online course Via Zoom, June 2nd–23rd June 2026,
Tuesdays , 7–9pm BST

Book your place→ Limited to 8 participants | £225

You can read more about what led to me developing Compassion Journalling and my other compassion building tools in Writing Myself Back.

Scrabbling*

I’m always scrabbling
scrabbling, scrabbling scrabbling

Hard to tell on Zoom maybe
but in person the tells are there

Scrabbling up and down the house
retrieving mislaid glasses
Grabbling fresh water
the cat’s not just sampled

It’s easy to forget
in the scrabble
that I still show up

Tick, tick, ticking off my to-do list
Less effortlessly than I might wish

Hurtling through the doors to the doctors office just in time
– but a week early

Making it to meetings
– presentable if not serene

Arriving early at the vet
I hurried up and waited patiently,
it was an emergency appointment –
I was grateful to be seen

And now I’m creating space
giving myself grace
letting go for the moment –
the mess of papers
my sadness that my beautiful pup struggles more each day

celebrating this moment –
in community with other writers
who also showed up today

We’ve come together
from Gorebridge and Edinburgh in Scotland,
the west of Ireland
– wish I’d asked for pics!
the gateshead border of County Durham
Brighton by the sea
as far away as Austin, Texas
and as close to me as Richmond.
At home in Twickenham

we’re all equally close on Zoom – in our very different places
geographically and in mind.

Scribbling away, not scrabbling.

*A process poem with minor edits made for clarity

You are invited to join us for next week’s session where we will explore found poetry. Feel free to bring some writing from journals, letters, your favourite book. Or just yourself. Showing up is plenty.

Weekly Wednesday Write Togethers 5.30-6.30pm:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89578861993?pwd=dXNHcOSjSB87o246QR69Pfctp23N4A.1

Spread the word.

I ask: how would you speak to a dear friend who shared this with you?

The answers come quickly. And in a distinctly warmer tone. Their natural compassion and warmth hits hard in contrast to their treatment of themselves once they clock it.

Then I invite them to turn that warmth inward.

Laughter, tears, and wry recognition often follow. Sometimes something quieter – a long pause as the dissonance settles. The realisation that how they’ve been speaking to themselves is not their voice and not their values.

Most of us already know, intellectually, that we’re harder on ourselves than we would be on anyone we love. What’s less obvious is what to do with that knowledge – how to get from understanding it to actually living differently. Telling yourself to be kinder doesn’t work. It’s about as helpful as being told to relax.

Compassion Journalling came out of my own need for nurturing support. I developed it during a family crisis, when I needed to stay resilient and had no one to offer me the grounding I so desperately needed. I started writing in two voices – one expressing whatever was present, however raw, the other responding with the attuned, non-judgmental attention I might offer a struggling client or friend. What surprised me was how quickly that second voice began to feel like mine. Not a performance. Not an aspiration. Not my fixer voice either – just a warm, holding presence that drew on everything I’d known and learned. I began to integrate it within me.

You can read the full origin story here.

That practice – two-pen dialogue – is at the heart of the four-week course I’ve been running for several years. We write in two colours, two voices, and over time something shifts. The conversation stops being on the page alone.

We don’t only write. We use poetry, hand mapping, lovingkindness practice – turning that same quality of attention toward the body, the heart, whatever is ready to be heard. We write collaboratively. We work with the inner critic – not to silence it or reframe it by force, but to listen for what’s underneath it and respond from felt sense. Reframing, when it comes, comes naturally. It’s never required.

“The setting you created allows inner world wisdom to emerge. I felt less alone – other people have similar thoughts, the things people do not talk about in daily life. A beautiful setting to share.” – Elisabeth

The course runs over four Tuesday evenings, and something about that rhythm – returning weekly, carrying the practice into ordinary life between sessions – is part of how it works. Each participant receives a 58-page Compassion Journal Companion, and graduates are invited to continue through monthly Compassion Circles.

No previous writing experience needed. Just an openness to explore.

Compassion Journalling – A 4-Week Course
Tuesdays 2nd–23rd June 2026 | 7–9pm BST |
Online via Zoom | Limited to 8 participants | £225

Find out more →
Book your place→
Read what past participants say →

my grubby but indispensable journal

I’ve been circling the edges of this Substack since January – writing when something was alive, going quiet when work got busy. I’ve been watching the subscriber count tick up, thanks in part to generous cheerleading from others (Alice Bramhill, and Morgan Clementine – thank you) while I pondered what I was actually doing here.

I think I now know.

So here’s what Self-Centred is, as clearly as I can say it.

The personal essays are the heart of it. Once a month, roughly – sometimes more if something won’t leave me alone. They’ll be about whatever is genuinely alive to me: late diagnosis and what it keeps revealing, walks on Exmoor, what I’m reading, what I’m resisting, the gap between the compassion I offer in my practice and the compassion I withhold from myself. Not so much lessons – more dispatches.

The notes will be shorter, more frequent, less polished. Observations from facilitation and life. A poem that cracked something open. A question I don’t have an answer to yet. The kind of thing I’d say to a colleague or friend over coffee.

Wednesday Write-Together is a weekly space – 5:30–6:30 pm UK time – where I offer a prompt and we write alongside each other. No performance, no sharing required. Just an hour to turn toward yourself. Some weeks I’ll be there with a full session, some weeks I’ll offer a light prompt and hold the space. You can take inspiration from what I offer, or write on what most matters to you. I’ll let you know when I’m away.

Everything stays free for now. In September I’ll introduce a paid tier – for people who want more: a monthly themed workshop session, additional pieces, community space. I’ll tell you what that looks like well before it happens.

What I won’t be doing: posting to a schedule I can’t sustain, manufacturing content to feed an algorithm, or performing consistency I don’t feel.

What I can promise: writing when something feels true. Showing up for Write-Together most weeks (barring holidays and illness). Building something I actually want to be part of – and share with you.

If that sounds like your kind of thing – please pull up a chair.

Wednesday Write-Together: 20th May, 5:30 pm UK. Free to join.
Recurring Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89578861993?pwd=dXNHcOSjSB87o246QR69Pfctp23N4A.1

One other thing: my next Compassion Journalling course runs across four Tuesday evenings – 2nd, 9th, 16th and 23rd June, 7–9 pm UK time.
Small group, 8 places max.
We’re exploring self-compassion through writing. If you’ve been curious about the practice, or want to return to it, booking and details are here. And as always, reach out if you have any questions.

I have been wanting to see the Exmoor wild ponies for three years – ever since they arrived in my life through my MSc dissertation, research into Gottman's Four Horsemen as a framework for understanding the way we communicate with ourselves. (More on that at the end, if you're curious.)

The ponies came to represent the self-centred us we can come home to, once we free ourselves from self-criticism, self-contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. For three years they had lived in my imagination as mentors – the unbranded, freely-moving selves I was helping others, and myself, to find. The weekend before last, my husband Carl and I finally went on a rare weekend away together.

I should say: I have not been well. Post-COVID lungs, exhaustion and ongoing symptoms I haven’t yet got to the bottom of. Even climbing the stairs has been a lot of late. It felt a lifetime ago that I was kayaking down the Thames so our short trip felt significant both physically and psychologically to me.

What The Map Couldn’t See

Google Maps estimated one hour each way. It did not factor in the incline, the uncertain ground, the gorse – dense, high, and entirely invisible on any map or my own fear of heights and lack of fitness – that made the terrain something other than the gentle moorland stroll implied. The walk took six hours in total, including breaks and the return and I loved almost every minute of it. Despite being impeded further by wearing my daughter’s walking boots, too new and slightly wrong, housing feet that already struggle in the tamest of shoes. I am genuinely proud that I reached the summit. I want to say that plainly, because the old me would be embarrassed by such a slight success and shamed by the level of challenge I found it.

On the way up, I thought about the gap between the map and the territory – like a course outline ill-informed by the refinement of delivering it, between the living, breathing, unknown resistances of the people experiencing it. All theory and no practice is inauthentic. You can’t hand someone a route you haven’t trialled and tested yourself. The road has things to tell you that the map cannot see.

What Surfaced on the Climb

It would be tidy to say the walk was healing and I felt renewed connection to myself, my husband and the beautiful nature we were part of. It would be partly true but I would be omitting – and I say this with love – the live demonstration of the Four Horsemen between my beloved and me, and within us both too.

Carl, despite being 60, looks mid-40s and is very fit, whereas, although I am a mere 49 years of age, I am considerably less so. He cycles 40 miles a day despite his own health challenges and was thrilled that this had earned him an effortless climb. He was trying to be supportive but he was also defensive, hot on any perceived criticism and anticipating my giving up or being unhappy with him for saying it was an hour’s walk. I was sanguine towards him about the unexpected level of challenge, although his defensiveness rankled mine. Any criticism was initially angled inwards, together with moments closer to contempt – at the stark contrast between how he meets his physical challenges and how I collapse into mine. Between where I want to be healthwise and where I am. Our different neurotypes served to sharpen the edges of ordinary misunderstanding, the way they too often still do, despite it being our 19th year together. Underneath it all: love. His genuine, unfailingly nurturing love shown through concern and sometimes overly cossetting attentiveness and care. I could see that and by the summit we were laughing and rebonded in the shared challenge and connection.

My focus since graduating has been building and refining Compassion Journalling as both standalone offering and foundation for the Four Horsemen course borne out of my research work. You build self-trust and resilience before you take on the harder work of looking at how the Horsemen move through you. I had last updated the outline for this course over a year ago.

The Ponies

We were pointed in the right direction by some fellow walkers who had spotted us from a distance – Carl triumphant on the summit marker, the two of us caught kissing. The ponies, it turned out, were a little further down.

And they were branded with an anchor. I was both shocked and unsurprised.

I watched my symbol of self-liberation, still owned. Marked but unbroken, free-moving creatures I had been carrying in my imagination for years.

I felt the honour of sharing space with a pony brunching on gorse and spring flowers, as if one and the same before noticing the whole herd. I was overwhelmed with excitement, like a little girl. Until I noticed one pony beneath the others, lying very still.

The pony’s tail moving only twice, and barely. The herd was gathered around and nearby. Two of them nose to nose – co-regulating I was sure.

I felt their worry and grief. I didn’t want to invade by getting any closer. My certainty arrived fully formed, that she was dying and they were keeping watch. I told Carl it was time to go, that we should leave them be. I tried to hide my tears but Carl responded to my stark change in mood by providing an alternative story. He was kind but equally sweeping in his assessment that it was just napping. I felt irritated and patronised, as if dismissed for what I knew to be true.

I still don’t know what was actually happening. That pony might have been dying. Or resting. The herd gathered might have been witness to upcoming loss, or to something else entirely. I made my story and held it hard, and that says more about me in that moment than the pony.

Suffice to say, we finally saw the ponies. I loved it but it was bittersweet.

The Way Back

We took a gentler route back. The gorse gave way to wildflowers. And then, entirely unexpectedly, we found the Periwinkle tea room – with a gallery to its side, the kind of picturebook place you only find by going the wrong way.

We bought necklaces for our three daughters. Carl, who rarely gets a treat, had a slice of vegan gluten-free cake.

I had a less rare but very welcome slice of my own. We took photographs of the wildflowers we’d walked through to get there.

The descent was less steep but still agony for my feet who were quietly insistent on me listening to what they have been begging me a lifetime to hear. I underplayed the pain– I was happy and felt connected to Carl and myself. I was grateful – but every step was placed deliberately, in negotiation with my poor feet, and the state of them when we got home told their own story.

Animal First

Since coming home I have ordered shoes from a company called Freet. It came with a little card about following the perfect design of the human foot. Wide fit, properly wide. Not shoes I’ve squeezed toward. Not shoes that hobble. I found it unexpectedly moving as if it was affirming my feet’s permission to be.

I am an animal before I am anything else – before I am a professional, mother, woman shaped by what I was told I should be. The journey took six hours with blisters, borrowed boots, and a long painful lesson in how being self-centred is about centring oneself in our bodies as much as our minds.

I also came home agreeing to Carl’s long term dream for a campervan, which I had previously considered as a threat rather than a promise. We came back closer than we left, which is welcome and somewhat unexpected, and we are determined to do more adventuring, just the two of us.

Back in London, a visit to our vet – for entirely unrelated domestic chaos – happened to turn to the ponies. She thought it likely the pony was an expectant mother, the herd close protecting the arrival of the yet unbranded foal. I don’t know if that’s true. But its potential promise sits differently in my body.

April’s Other Threads

There was more to this month – bullet journalling as a tool for self-mapping rather than productivity performance, experiments with understanding my own dopamine wiring, the ongoing question of how to be present on Substack without it becoming another performance of engagement. I’ll write about these. What would you most like to hear about?

And if you’ve been to Exmoor, or if you have a three-year appointment you haven’t yet kept – I’d love to know about it and how you might make it happen for you.

Gottman’s Four Horsemen – criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling – were originally identified as predictors of relationship breakdown.

My MSc research explored what happens when we apply that same lens to the way we talk to ourselves. More on the course that’s emerging from that work soon.

As I step down as co-editor of Lapidus International Magazine, we’re looking for the next editor(s) to take it forward.

Lapidus International is the leading organisation for writing for wellbeing in the UK – championing the use of writing to support health, connection, and community. The magazine is a key part of that work.

The role is voluntary, and it can be taken on individually or as part of a team.

Tomorrow Alison Cable (my co-editor) and I are holding an open meeting – a chance to ask questions and find out what the role involves before deciding whether to put yourself forward. You don’t need to be a Lapidus member to apply.

📅 Tomorrow – 6 pm UK time. Free Time Converter

🔗 Find out more about lapidus.org.uk.

💻 Join: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83771100467 Meeting ID: 837 7110 0467

Please share widely – this could be a brilliant opportunity
for the right person or people.

Rose Wylie, Study for Red Twink, 2002 (one of my favourites).

I saw Rose Wylie’s exhibition yesterday with a friend. I chose it to help foster our commitment to joy and playfulness within our own creativity; it left my friend cold, and me flu-like, filled with internal conversation to navigate and unpick.

I’d been wrestling with something before I even arrived – the fact that I encourage my participants to take themselves seriously as writers, whatever their literacy level, and yet resist identifying as a writer myself. It was , in a short course about being a creative through Substack, who mentioned visiting the exhibition with her daughter. Something in its playfulness appealed to me as playfulness is a quality I want to make more space for in my personal practice.

The Gate-Keeping Dilemma

I was both admiring and a little envious of how playfully and seriously Wylie takes her art, appreciative of the energy in some of them and at the same time mistrusting as to whether some of the pieces actually constitute art. If an imaginative child’s pictures were given the weight of size and the standing of the Royal Academy, would critics necessarily know the difference? Or, like seeing the beauty and meaning in the everyday, does the very act of taking them seriously – of giving time and space to reflective consideration of these art pieces, some modern historical first-hand recollections of recent history – make them culturally important?

We entered into some large naive renderings of planes that felt so flat and child-like, oppressively naive – my first instinct was to feel vaguely insulted that I had paid £22.50 a ticket to witness someone’s childish imaginings. I felt a little embarrassed. I had treated my friend to this outing, designed to inspire us both and excite conversation, and it felt self-indulgent, the visual art equivalent of publishing personal writing without considering the reader.

RW Party Clothes (Rose Wylie), 2016

The interpretive blurb described this figure as wearing red lipstick and a 1950s-style conical bra. Looking at her, I couldn’t see either. The lips read black and there is no definition to suggest her breasts in any form, natural or conical. If the official text is getting the image wrong, it makes me question its authority. The internal barometer gauging whether this exhibition exemplified empowering expressive art versus the work of self-indulgent chancers was wavering a little further toward the latter.

To find myself judging myself for both inclinations – gate-keeper and Emperor’s New Clothes victim – makes this exhibition worth reflecting on. I offer these reflections in relation to my own struggles identifying as an artist, specifically a writer, and not as an attempt at serious art criticism – unlike the small huddles of serious-looking artists and critics sharing their insights in low, self-consciously considered tones clustered around the gallery. I don’t think they were part of the exhibit, but they added to its potential for satire.

Picasso is often quoted as saying: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”. Although he was problematic as a man, I cannot deny his talent or how his series of bull paintings show his compulsion to find simplicity and child-like energy in form.

Pablo Picasso, The Bull, 1945

In a Cowslip’s Bell with Music, 2020, King Alfred, 2015, German Botanical Drawing, 2016,

Crown Imperial (From the Garden), 2015.

This botanical series complicated my thinking further. I appreciate the humour in the titles – ‘In a Cowslip’s Bell with Music’ has a Shakespearean reach that the image alone doesn’t quite meet – and yet, as purely visual art, I find myself pondering what to do with it. I can’t help imagining somebody buying it for enormous sums to hang in their house, at the expense of their own and perhaps their children’s art. And yet, I am uneasy, there’s enough vision here to suggest the lack is in fact mine.

What Worked For Me

And yet. I could see and appreciate the energy in others:

Bathing Costume, Green. Glamour Personified. 1950.

Here the collage technique does something traditional rendering couldn’t – the figure gains embodiment through positioning rather than form. The fragments of paper create a curve that feels present, alive, three-dimensional in a fresh way that the drawing alone might not have achieved.

Running bird and silver birch. 2007.

This and the next picture have an undeniable energy for me. I can feel the bird’s sense of agency and purpose in escaping the fold of the page, and the paper doll, so static in nature, gains personality and purpose on the page.

Pink Skater, Will I Win, 2015

This image is playful, feeling both joyful and liberatory, and yet the child-like representation and the infantilised portrayal of the woman brought up conflicting feelings, feeding my fear of exposure through self-delusion.

It feels churlish to note this, like I am raining on her happy parade and yet, it brought up, not judgement of the subject per se, but fear of ridicule in me.

The Need To Contextualise Art

I found myself explaining my choice of exhibition after the first two paintings to my friend – we’re both writing for wellbeing practitioners, so I reached for context to bridge the gap between what we were seeing and what I’d hoped she might see. The first room wasn’t encouraging. She looked politely bemused. I felt the mild social embarrassment of someone who has chosen the restaurant and watched their guest push its offerings around the plate.

Wikipedia – that most democratised of authorities – defines art as work expected to evoke a worthwhile experience through emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical proficiency, or beauty. Standing in front of those first planes, I found myself assessing it, almost with an imaginary tick box. Worthwhile to whom, after all? By whose measure?

For me, art as a process is my primary intention and I see its deeply therapeutic benefits daily but, for it to travel beyond individual experience – to touch the viewer rather than the artist alone – it needs to resonate. These weren’t with either of us. Yet.

Air Raid, 2015-2017

I didn’t take pictures of any of the aircraft paintings. They didn’t speak to me – until I read the context. And then I felt ashamed at my internal judgements, as if I was robbing her of agency, at the validity of her childhood memory of aerial bombardment being documented and heard. As a historical first-hand account, it contained power and has a right to be witnessed and its terror affirmed. It reminded me of child’s shoes included in war exhibits, and Anne Frank’s house and writing that meant so much to me.

The RA website waxes lyrical:

“Wylie paints freewheeling pictures, often with words loosely scrawled across them, that are gloriously big and crude, and full of a certain dry British humour that sends up any whiff of orthodoxy or pretension.”

Wylie herself is credited with saying “What I absolutely very much like is for them to get into museums where everybody can see them”. I find myself agreeing, and also disagreeing. Working my way through the hallowed exhibition halls with my £22.50 ticket (small concessions are available), I found myself contemplating using some of her work in workshops with independent living and housing trust clients, perhaps alongside artworks from a prisoner exhibition I enjoyed some time ago. Unlike the prisoner exhibition though, this one is only accessible to the privileged which seems a shame.

THE THERAPEUTIC POWER OF ART

Jacky Power – poet and trauma-focused psychotherapist – has been a quiet encouragement here: sharing process poetry not as a route to prizes or publication but for therapeutic benefit, offered openly. James Crews, in conversation with fellow compassion-led poet Julia Fehrenbacher, modelled something similar – his specific reservation about sharing unfinished poems, his years focused on editing anthologies, and his recent return to his own work in Breathing Room, all felt quietly familiar. I relate strongly to this instinct. My work as a therapeutic writing facilitator and co-editor of Lapidus magazine has been genuinely absorbing – but somewhere in the richness of holding space for others, my own creative writing quietly moved to the back of the queue. This exhibition, and the conversation it started, felt like another small nudge to moving it forward again.

What Is Art?

What is art? If it’s to get you talking, it didn’t work for my friend – but it resulted in my conversation with this page in the hope of engaging with you.

A workshop is forming in my mind for anyone who finds themselves judging their own inclinations before they’ve even picked up the pen – exploring who gives us permission to take ourselves seriously as creators, and how the most important permission is the one we give ourselves. Caleb Parkin – poet and contributor to Lapidus magazine – shared these ekphrastic prompts with permission to use and share widely. Over a cuppa after the exhibition, my friend and I picked a picture and answered the following prompts one by one. They create a ten-line growing poem building one word at a time. Why not pick a picture in this article – or one of your own – and have a go:

1. The most important word from the title (1 word)

2. An important texture in the painting (2 words)

3. The most striking colour from the painting (3 words)

4. Some sounds the poem is making (4 words)

5. One thing we love about this painting (5 words)

6. What we’d change about the painting (6 words)

7. A question we’d ask the artist about the painting (7 words)

8. A question we’d ask someone in the painting (8 words)

9. A question we’d ask something in the painting (9 words)

10. Write a new information sign for this painting (10 words)

Whatever this exercise produces for you – a fragment, a single line, something unfinished – please feel free to offer it up in the comments below. You don’t have to have arrived anywhere to share it here.