Still Living

It was a vivid dream that woke Catherine one June morning where she discovered a lump in her breast. A month later, she heard the words that would divide her life into a before and an after. Forty-three and in the middle of a separation, preparing to move house with her daughters - she thought she already knew what the mountain in front of her was. But she was wrong. What followed was an eighteen month climb through treatment and the dismantling of the life she had known. Just as the end of treatment finally seemed within reach, another cancer was discovered in her other breast - swiftly followed by a diagnosis of ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis), which gave a name to the constellation of symptoms she had been living with pre-cancer. Planting her colourful flags as she ascended the mountain she had climbed, survival, she discovered, was not the same as returning. And somewhere along the climb, another kind of journey had begun. Through dreams, meditation, mother nature and synchronicity, Catherine found herself reconnecting with an intuitive and spiritual language she had long learned to question. Who are we when something happens that changes us so profoundly that we can no longer go back to the person, body or life we were before? Still Living is a radically honest story of the mountains we never choose to climb and what it means to find our way home to ourselves when life has been irrevocably changed and rearranged. Through the guiding metaphor of a mountain, it traces her intimate journey from a trauma-aware and neurodivergent perspective. Moving between the physical and the spiritual, the psychological and the embodied, she explores the body's ways of knowing and all that helped her make meaning of what could not always be explained. Deeply compassionate, Still…