Have you any idea of the panic you can cause a bunch of hardened steelworkers by fainting on the factory floor? Especially when you're a woman. Half of them are afraid to even touch you, convinced something seriously wrong has happened - when actually it was just me being careless with my own energy. Honestly, the conversations I had after that one. When I finally came to, the estimates from my colleagues at the time ranged from hours to days. I'd guess it was seconds at most in reality (for...

I did the maths on this earlier in the week and it stopped me in my tracks a bit: I build "new starts" into my mental calendar roughly six times a year. September. Samhain. January. Imbolc. Easter. The start of school holidays. Being the child of two teachers, and married to a third, the school year is baked into my DNA at this stage - it doesn't matter that I haven't sat an exam in decades, my whole nervous system still thinks September is when things properly begin. I've been sitting with...

I beat myself up for straying from my path. Every single time. Which is a genuinely stupid thing for me to be doing, given what I actually teach for a living. But there it is - I skip a checkpoint, I go six months off track, and the first thing that shows up isn't "right, let's fix this," it's "you're supposed to be good at this, you teach this stuff." I think there's a version of me that believes if I'm teaching this, I should be good at it. And in some ways, I am. I built the whole cauldron...