Content note: this article contains references to bereavement and child loss that readers may find upsetting.

One ordinary evening in the autumn of 2016, I was driving home from lunch with my mother when my life changed in an instant, never to be the same again. A lorry jackknifed across the dual carriageway causing me to smash into it at nearly 70mph. Incredibly, both the lorry driver and I emerged without a scratch. It was an incredibly lucky escape, but something deep inside me was damaged in the crash, and the shock of the experience caused old grief and trauma to resurface. 

Twenty-five years earlier, I’d lost my beloved first husband, and then six years later, my nine-year-old daughter succumbed to the same rare form of blood cancer that had killed her father. Although I was physically unhurt, the crash affected me deeply. I couldn’t stop crying – to the extent that I was prescribed tranquilisers by my GP, which made me feel so spaced out that I just lay on my bed, my brain constantly revisiting the deaths of my first husband and child.

After a week, I stopped taking the tranquilisers and went back to work. It was what I had always done whenever grief threatened to overwhelm me. And it had proved remarkably effective at holding the demons at bay. I had an excellent career: for more than 20 years, I’d edited some of the biggest and most famous magazines in Britain. Twice named editor of the year, the awards I’d garnered filled an entire bookshelf. In the trade, the magazines I worked on are called ‘perfect bound’, which describes the binding process that glues the glossy pages together to form a spine. The phrase was also an apt description of my life at the time. I was highly paid, dressed exclusively in designer outfits and travelled from photo shoots to celebrity interviews and fashion shows in a Mercedes. But all that was to change – and more rapidly than I could imagine. 

“Losing my high-flying job, marriage and home in one year sent me into despair. Setting ‘small, achievable promises’ changed everything”