About

I've been writing here since 2007. Actually, since I was a small child, but let's call 2007 when I started this writing.

For a long time I wrote about dreams, omens, myth and the reading of signs. Later about raising children, about illness, about institutions. It looked like several subjects. It was one.

Every piece was an argument with somebody who wanted to tell me what my own experience meant. A manual. A diagnosis. A billboard outside a school. A government. I was raising daughters mostly alone and mostly without money, and I had already worked out that if I handed over the authority to say what my life meant, I wasn't going to get it back.

I studied semiotics, ideology and power, which is a formal way of learning to understand who benefits from a story. Then I spent years writing across different domains such as medicine, policy and government, which is where you really learn how a story gets built. It turned out to be one education.

I stopped writing for a long stretch. I stopped when people began enquiring too closely into my life. I shouldn't have, but I was tired.

In 2012 I wrote that I was looking forward to becoming a formidable old woman. That's still the plan. I'm closer to it than I was, although I'm not old yet and I aim to keep living well for as long as I can.