Girls Leading Our World, UK

I’m BEYOND excited 😝 to showcase these amazing character designs by my lovely, talented, beautiful (inside and out!) illustrator Jayda, I’m SO thrilled to be working with her, her creative juices are inspiring and it’s absolutely thrilling to see her working on my GLOW manual and student works on, amazing things are coming this way.. watch this space!

I’m getting extensions put in right now as I type this.. I never thought I’d get so emotional about this, actually I NEVER thought I’d be a 45 year old woman getting extensions put in full stop!
But I let my partner and my daughter talk me into it.. they’ve been saying for AGES that I’d look “so good” with extensions and it always made me feel a bit like, what don’t I look good enough as I am!? My defensive side wanted to keep saying F-U for even suggesting I don’t look good enough as I am, but curiosity got the best of me.. and maybe it will be fun!? 🤩 You never know until you try so this will be an experiment and I AM a scientist at the end of the day, so will I actually enjoy putting these fake things in my hair forcing me to take time out of my already too-busy schedule to take care of them? I predict I’ll be back to my easy super-short hair-do I fled to when my ex-husband abducted our kids to Spain.. I was in the hospital when he broke the news that I would “have” to move to Mallorca if I wanted to see the kids and the rebel in me ran away from him, grab some scissors from the nurse’s desk and go to the bathro to cut ALL my hair off! Hahaha 🤣 You have to laugh now, but that was how I dealt with the trauma, I changed my appearance.. maybe I’m still doing that…

Focussing much on my appearance has been an area I struggle with.. One part of me likes looking my best, wearing makeup, dressing up etc, but another part of me yearns still to be loved just as I AM—tired eyes, spotty face and beer belly (I KNOW I don’t actually have a beer belly but my childhood trauma and mom/sister’s OVER focus on the super thin ideal still whispers in my ear)… So I’ve worked hard to go makeup-less MOST of the time and I reserve dressing up for special occasions, but I suppose today IS a special day, it’s date night with my babes and he’s planned a special treat so I’m VERY excited 😝 We WILL be toasting to US, this past week has been a real test for us and we have prevailed! I’m forever and ever grateful I met this wonderful man Bryan Killilea, I cannot wait to lift a glass of champagne to you tonight ❤️🥰 Thank you for loving me, huge giant pimples and all, thank you for supporting me day after day (and night after night), your job never ends and I’m always grateful 🙏🏽 CONSTANTLY thanking God for Bumble bringing me my Bumble Bee 🐝- those crocheted Bumble bees 🐝 I made you buy are a symbol of US- you have the big protector Bumble Bee and I kept the baby bee because that’s how it feels sometimes, I have you around to keep me safe in this CRAZY world, just like the song we saw right in front of us at Coldplay - seeing Aslan perform that song was like hearing you sing to me, “How can I protect you in this CRAZY WORLD!?” 🎶 (See previous post weeks ago where I went on and on about this experience)… But it’s the truth, you DO protect me in a crazy world where intent scammers are racking in cash 💰 every G-D day and it makes me SO angry 😡 that some toolbox in Lithuania or wherever has tried to break us apart, but WE are stronger than that—WE are the BEE 🐝 TEAM and we will NOT be taken down by some idiot messing with my poor little head!! And thank you in advance for coming with me tomorrow to report the cybercrime to the police because I actually love for you to speak for me in this case so I don’t have to relive it all myself… Usually I hate being interrupted and talked over (like my ex used to do ALL THe TIME!), but in your case, you tend to talk over me at just the right time because you know me so well.. how did we ever get so lucky!? 🍀 Oh yeah, it’s fate, it’s in the stars, it was written on our star charts at birth, it was the full moon that messed with my head last week (could be!?), or we really were destined to meet that fateful night of August 3rd, 2023… how has it ONLT been a year babes!? I feel like you’ve known me my whole life….

Morning cuppa iced flat white because believe it or not, it’s ACTUALLY a nice sunny day ☀️ here in Dublin, but my side kick and I enjoyed a lovely coffee from our favourite doggy-friendly cafe Bear Market in the village. Thank you for always being so kind to my doggo! Bear Market Coffee
Bear Market also donates the coffee we drink at Laura Lynn, thanks 🙏🏽 for that, makes going on site for work a dream 💭

That’s love.

That is MY man, who I’ve just put through hell and back—AGAIN—carrying our shopping and a rucksack weighed down with all our devices (his computer, my computer, AND my iPad) so he could do some work for me while I was at yoga 🧘

He has the purest, most beautiful soul and I’m so blessed to call him mine.

Amazing that you could think you couldn’t possibly be any more in love with someone and then subconsciously put them through a trial and come to find there’s no end to how deeply you can love someone.

Yoga this AM then some early Christmas shopping and belated birthday pressie shopping with the Bee 🐝 today. Still on digital detox, enjoying my new dumb phone very much. It even has Tetris!
Let’s have a competition for who can have the LEAST amount of screentime per day, who’s in!? I’m going for less than an hour, no social media intake and mainly just taking photos, let’s use our brains to challenge our memory rather than rely on Google.. Today I remembered a lesser known TV series I adored called Years and Years on BBC, #🐝 C (BBC) - a bit futuristic but very thought provoking, hope to rewatch it with my BEE who is always reminding me to just BE and not Always be DOING like my ADD makes me feel, I’m constantly fidgeting and cannot sit still easily (unless I’m in a yoga class), thanks to The Space Between yoga studio for providing such a beautiful space to practice the_spacebetween

I’m tagging Wig Wam because I enjoyed a lovely drag brunch there awhile back, such a fun afternoon with the AWCD and my gal pal Sabrina (whose also an amazing doggie 🐶 minder for The Butts)

Taxiing home with all our loot 💰, then back to my beloved brick phone for as long as possible. Battery is about to go which is a good thing then I’m out of action!

Funny story before I wrap this rambling up, when I was about 4 or 5 my family asked me on our long 10 hour car journey to go skiing at Christmas in Snowshoe WV, how was it that our bodies had the energy to RUN and go and do things, obviously my tiny little brain hadn’t had a biology lesson yet so I replied “batteries,” it seemed fitting at the time since all my toys I most enjoyed needed batteries to work, but it feels like I was right these days as we have siphoned off our brains these days to our phones and we can’t seem to remember or think without them. I challenge you to give up your smart phone or at least set a time limit for yourself and get back into the REAL WORLD!!!

Currently taking a digital detox, going back to the 1990s with a new “dumb phone”, reminiscent now of some good times with my bestie Anna Cowie at Boardmasters 2022, surf contest, good tunes, sure we didn’t even need alcohol we were high on life!

Appreciation of beauty is sparked every time I am labelled as “manic” for when I’m in that state EVERY. SINGLE. THING that I look at is beautiful and I feel compelled to share this beauty with the world, hence the extra social media posts when others around me say I’m “manic,” they simply don’t understand or see the beauty the way I do. Art is meant to be shared, beauty is better enjoyed with someone, to share that moment of awe at the museum or gift shop or looking at that flower together. Just try if you can to stop and take a photo of something you find beautiful and share it with a loved one and tell them WHY you find it so miraculously stunning. Why did it touch you? Was it the miracle that went into creating it? Because EVERYTHING is a miracle to me.

Back in Londontown and just met my girlfriend Francyne for lunch, I was running late so I picked up these BEAUTIFUL peony roses! I had never even knew peony roses existed I thought they were just mini peonies, aren’t they gorgeous!?

I walked through a rainbow once.
Bryan rolls his eyes when I tell this story but I swear it’s TRUE! I was at Kylemore Abbey in Galway, and I had just gone into the chapel to pray and light a few candles, leave an offering, my mom was there but she didn’t come into the chapel with me, she had come over because I’d had another ‘manic’ episode, or rather an attempt at coming out as my TRUE self but the world just wasn’t ready for me yet. That’s how I see it anyways. Because I’m NOT manic now, I’ve been told, I am just experiencing symptoms of Complex PTSD and my psychiatrist has essentially left me to my own devices, that is, continue on with my therapist and good luck. There’s no medication for recovering from Complex PTSD because it’s psychological, not a psychiatric condition that causes some sort of chemical imbalance or is heritable. You can’t ‘catch’ Complex PTSD, it’s something that happens when you’ve experienced numerous traumas in your life. So try to be more understanding when someone tells you they have a history of trauma, or ANY mental health condition for that matter because shunning them or judging them or distancing yourself from them (all of the above I’ve experienced)—it only makes it worse for us. The stigma is REAL, no one wants to hear about your trauma, and now we have this term ‘trauma dumping’ whereby we are essentially adding stigma to the experience of someone who is trying to reach out for support, I actually can’t stand that term, and all the trigger warnings, to me, it’s a bit much sometimes, I think if you want to share you’re experience with someone and then they label you as ‘trauma dumping,’ then they just don’t have empathy and that’s THEIR problem, not yours. Sure I get that sometimes there’s work that needs to be done or other issues at hand, but stigmatizing someone who has had genuine trauma, and I’m talking REAL trauma, because I think the word is overused too, those people need support and need to be able to express themselves without be shamed for doing so.

Just watch what you say, that’s all, because words can cut deep, and your silly, snarky, off hand remark may have seemed funny in the moment and maybe your victim even went along and laughed with you as well, but let’s stop this nonsense about assuming everyone with a mental health diagnosis is somehow incompetent and less worthy of love. We ALL deserve love!!!

So I’ve been told now I’ll live forever.
And I’m okay with that. Because Bryan is living forever too so it will be worth it so long as we can face forever together.
We drank the water from this fountain in Sintra that our tour guide claims allows you to live for eternity. You see the thing is I already knew I was going to live forever but it was nice to have that added affirmation and to know that Bryan is stuck here living forever with me.
If you’d asked me just a few months ago I would have happily declined the offer to live forever because I actually didn’t even want to live just one more day so this whole life everlasting business is still new to me. But I know one thing for certain, my life now is IN Christ and therefore I WILL live forever.
I talk to God regularly, nearly constantly, now this is a secret mind you because if I said this to my psychiatrist they’d throw me back in the hospital but I just got out a few weeks ago and saw him last week and got the all clear so please don’t tell him or else I’m locked up… yet again!!
But it’s so true, God speaks to me, but I’m not claiming to have magical powers or anything because He speaks to ALL of us, we just have to be quiet and still enough to hear Him. No God doesn’t have a particular voice in my head, I only “hear” MY voice but I know it’s God putting these thoughts in my head, it’s God driving me every day to do what I do. I fight for justice, to help others, to ENJOY LIFE! God WANTS us to delight in His creation! He never intended for us to sit around and be miserable, why would He do that? He LOVES us, He WANTS us to enjoy each other, have some pleasure, experience this Earth and all its wonder, admire it’s beauty and if you just stop and put your phone down for a minute you’ll see that beauty EVERYWHERE! It’s literally like every, SINGLE thing that I observe is a freaking miracle because it IS if you really think about it. If we could just stop and take it in then I think there’d be a lot less misery in this world.
But, that’s just it, we can’t, and for YEARS, I couldn’t either! I couldn’t experience joy or pleasure or happiness, not even close! I had a demon called depression in my brain that robbed me of that and I had to fight the good fight to cast that as***le out of my head and rescue MYSELF from hell! Because living with suicidal depression IS hell, true hell, there can’t be anything worse than having 7474837363737272737 reasons right in front of you to be happy but you just can’t FEEL it. When you have two amazing healthy kids, a loving, devoted partner, a lovely home, nice food to eat, and money isn’t really an issue, one has to wonder what the F**K is wrong with you that you can’t be happy!?? And I wondered it too!! I don’t HAVE to work! How sweet is that!? I’m grateful to my ex-husband that he’s worked so hard for the both of us that I can just do whatever the f**k I want! Like Cartman, I do what I want! My son Callan likes to guilt trip me about it still though when I explain that I WANT to work, that work is IMPERATIVE for me and my mental health, he complains about my forcing him to do Art Club after school and refuse to pick him up early, but why? So he can come home and watch YouTube videos!? I think not!! Art and creativity are CRUCIAL life skills that aren’t being fostered enough in our schooling system these days and it’s these skills like flexibility and creative thinking, that I’m thrusting in him through the Art Club opportunity he has been offered and should be a bit more grateful that he CAN go to Art Club, but gratitude is still a work in progress with my little man for he’s been given a lot and as much as I remind him as such I also don’t want him to feel guilty about his privilege. You see harassing him to be more grateful just breeds shame and guilt, that’s how I grew up, we were regularly called “spoiled brats” by my mom and it hurt. I couldn’t help it that my dad was a successful ophthalmologist, I didn’t ASK to be born into the family I did but yet I was NEVER grateful enough no matter what I did, it felt. And so began the cycle of guilt, shame, the breeding grounds for depression. For when you turn that pain that the world inevitably throws at you inward towards yourself then you start to believe you’re just bad, unworthy, unloveable and there is when the Devil steps in and the self loathing takes over. It’s hard to resist and you don’t even see it coming. You’re minding your own business, trying to do the right thing, reading the Bible, obeying the commandments, praying even, but when the Devil gets in your head, hate to say it, but you’re F**KED! I was certainly f**ked! Big time f**ked, for almost two and a half years solid!! And then when you add to that people around you who are just adding more toxicity, more criticism, more blame, then you are ROYALLY F**KED! Been there, done that, have the damned passport stamp and everything but never again.

You see, the devil had control of me because I KNEW I had potential, I was voted Most Likely to Succeed in high school, this almost became a curse for me, the Devil used this to taunt me and say yeah “look at you now, you haven’t had a JOB in six years, you’re JUST a stay-at-home mom, what a loser!” And then I got the only job I really could, a research assistant position at a children’s hospice, LauraLynn. But the devil STILL wouldn’t leave me alone, that f**ker was like “yeah but you never finished your PhD, you tried TWICE and couldn’t hack it, you’ll never aspire to anything! Ha and you wanted to be a Clinical Psychologist, phffff, now you have the same job tile at age 45 that you had when you were 23! What a lame-o LOSER you are!” I couldn’t get him to shut up! I prayed and prayed and prayed to get him to go away, but God has to teach me a lesson, God had to put me through that trial to be able to make me who I am and what I am today. I’m not here JUST to be a Clinical Psychologist and just because I had to drop out of my PhD twice doesn’t mean there’s isn’t third opportunity out there for me to find, God is speaking in my ear right now saying Go For it! You CAN! And I hear you God, I hear you now loud and clear! This shop ain’t retired yet, I just had to take a break from work for a few years to raise my babies but I’m not being let out to pasture just yet, I’ve just been biding my time, making sure my kids have the best possible start they could have in their 14 and 10 years of life and I can proudly look at them and (most of the time) say, damn, I did a pretty good job 👍🏼

And no other job title could allow for that because my NUMBER ONE goal as a parent was to make sure my kids knew LOVE and through the love I’ve shown them I believe they’ve come to know God as well. Not because I took them to church every Sunday because God isn’t just at church, god IS LOVE, so if you KNOW love, if you’ve ever really really deeply wholly truly loved anything or anyone then you’ve met God because that’s where He resides, that’s ALL He wants for us, is to know LOVE, and so that is my hope for you, to love, to find love wherever you can, to find that special someone or something that makes you experience LOVE on its deepest most intimate level, then by God you’ve been saved!

Check out my new logo for my spiritual offshoot of Girls Lead Our World - GLOW: God LOVES Our World, more to come..