Perhaps you feel the September pressure: that kind of new-books, start-of-the-school-year sort of pressure to press reset and tidy up. I say that, but again, aren’t there years where that feels exciting and hopeful, not stressful and loaded? What dictates our emotional response to these situations? And how do we help ourselves choose to respond with gratitude and excitement and joy and graciousness?

I’d like to share with you how I’m feeling at the moment:

Angry.

Hopeful.

Confused/slightly overwhelmed.

Let’s break it down.

Anger. The anger part may surprise you, depending on what ‘anger’ means to you and how it looks. I’m not talking about violence or hatred, but rather passionate disagreement and frustration.

When life gets busy (gets busy? Isn’t it always?) it’s far too easy to lose ourselves amongst the whims and wishes of others and lose our own shape in our attempts to mould ourselves to those around us. One of the most helpful things I’ve been asked over the past few weeks whenever I’m struggling with a decision is: “What do you want?”.

I just spent a weekend volunteering with a charity called Camp JoJo, which allows children with disabilities to experience camping. It’s quite a full-on weekend, and I always come away with a kind of terrified awe at any parents’ ability to keep children both continually safe and entertained. Sometimes people who haven’t had experience with children with disabilities before feel nervous, but you soon learn that children all really want and need the same things.

This week, I’ve been thinking - in various ways and various guises - about the ways in which we communicate.

I’ve met quite a few new people recently - through hobbies, mostly - and it’s interesting noticing communication styles as we get to know people. We ask questions, right? We want to get to know each other. We let people into our lives, piece by piece; we give them clues about our day - everything from what we did and what we ate through to our emotional state.

When did you get told you had to draw inside the lines?

I remember every Easter and Christmas at primary school, we had a colouring competition. It was basically a competition to see who could colour in most neatly and most precisely within the lines. Like a game of Operation, any small error elicited an unpleasant buzzing sound. We learnt to be precise; to draw neatly and to cut smooth corners around the edges of the paper Christmas tree.

When I landed on my word of the year, ‘Brave’, it was because I felt I had big dreams and potential and I didn't want insecurity or imposter syndrome to stand in my way. I thought that 'brave' would push me through being afraid to take on new things, or the fear that I wasn't good enough or strong enough to take on what I wanted. And that's not untrue: there's just another side to brave I didn't see before.

Do you want the truth or something beautiful?

I believe that often the most beautiful thing is the truth.

When I wrote a pretty candid newsletter two weeks back about how everything was feeling all too much for me, I lost two subscribers. I don't like that that bothers me, because it's ignoring the majority of you who are loyal and loving readers, but it did. It doesn't mean I was wrong, or they were wrong, but that we weren't right together.

I'm very good at being negative. Unless I'm reminded not to, I will focus on all the things that are not going well and somehow, miraculously, forget the myriad other things that are actually going very well.

This, of course, is a natural human trait that once aided our survival: why look up to notice the beauty of a cloudless blue sky on a summer's day when there's predators lurking at your feet?

It's done! It feels quite surreal to say that I ran the London Marathon on Sunday and, if you follow me on socials, you'll know that I've been buzzing ever since! (Maybe the duration of the runner's high is proportional to the distance covered?)

I wanted to share with you a few things that I learnt from the experience:

1. It was truly an amazing exercise in mindfulness. Just before I started, I felt this rising surge of panic: how on earth was I going to be able to run for 26 miles? But once you start, you're in it. And each mile you run, you're really focussing on that mile and then the next mile, and the next. For those few hours, you have a laser-beam focus on the task at hand. Really, there is nowhere else to be and nothing else to do.

A friend of mine has just bought a Nokia 3310. I remember the first phone I had was a MyV55. It was silver but had these curvy black lines that made it look kind of sleek. I remember being with a friend from primary school and I had managed to sneak one of my sister's old phones out of the house and into my teeny-tiny, pointless handbag. We spent the afternoon in the Safeways cafe making fake calls to fake boyfriends on a phone that didn't work; it was thrilling. We still tease my sister for losing her phone when she fell in the river at Henley regatta; I remember losing my Blackberry in a Starbucks on the second day I had it and how angry my dad was at me (it wasn't yet insured).

I want to say I have a complicated relationship with food, but it's difficult to write that without considering whether, in fact, we all do. I challenge you not to have a somewhat accordion-like relationship with food in a world in which processed foods are ubiquitous and obesity has become a global epidemic.

How do we retain some sense of normality around our food habits when advice about healthy eating is not only constantly forced down our throats, but also confusing and conflicting?

I think if I wasn't lucky enough to be in a position to afford weekly counselling sessions, I would probably attribute my procrastination to undiagnosed ADHD.

Before I started this weekly blog I had a different blog, called The Fodmap Medic and back in 2017, I wrote a piece called ‘Procrastination: maybe it’s okay'. (You can read it here if you're interested.) That was six years ago and my inability to take things to the Post Office in a timely fashion hasn't changed. (Perhaps the past isn't so much a foreign country yet…)

It is our perception that truly matters.