Brief musings on grief, resolutions, transphobia and a Christmas tree's end.

TW Suicide, anxiety, references to transphobia

We are ten days into 2025 and I’ve been to the gym six times, not bad when I haven’t managed to work out at all since August. Dry January is also proving a breeze after a rather boozy December. As 2024 drew to a close I acknowledged I’d been increasingly relying on alcohol, to endure the reality of living on after Alice’s death in May 2022. Not stupor inducing gallons of it, but a regular drip feed to inoculate me against the incessant pressure I feel from others, either real or imagined, that this far down the line life should really be returning to 'normal'. Let me disabuse you of that notion. It isn't.

Even the smallest interaction with a shopkeeper, or a tradesperson can feel like a trick or a trap, that I am about to be caught out for some undefined misdemeanour. Though I know my misdemeanour, I am the mother who let their child die. And although - when my therapist, my friends and family challenge me - as they repeatedly do, I can agree this isn’t really true; it feels true. The shame and regret I bear can be so debilitating that I imagine anyone, and everyone can see it.  I may as well have ‘bad mother’ tattooed upon my forehead.

Yet I can have days where I feel almost entirely well. The grandiose, almost narcissistic notion I have, that everyone can read me, see right through me, that leaves me feeling so exposed and vulnerable, disappears. I am just a regular person, going about her regular life, no one cares and neither should I.

Yesterday I went to Crossfit on my own, for the very first time since Alice died. Capable Caroline on display. But as I burpeed and power cleaned, when a series of ABBA tracks blasted from the speakers, uninvited and unstoppable tears poured down my cheeks.  The familiar soundtrack of my pre-teens took me back to a different time, a time before; when anything else might have happened, but this. And quite suddenly, from a place of energy and power, I was chest deep in grief and barely able to breathe.

It is so discombobulating, to flip between these versions of myself without any choice or warning. Yesterday, by sheer determination, by the literal lifting of a heavy weight from ground to chest, I was able to lift myself out of a spiralling panic. The crying anxious Caroline feels more authentic, but increasingly the coping, cooperating one feels more necessary. Which is why I am here today, writing. For whilst I have managed ten days of sobriety and exercise, I have not sat down to write a single thing (beyond the odd post to bluesky) for months. And I need to, it makes me feel alive in a way nothing else does.

Why is it that the thing I like the best is the hardest to settle to? Certainly, since Alice, my hardwired, infant instilled fears, of making mistakes and getting things entirely wrong, are sometimes amplified to such an alarming volume I cannot imagine any outcome for my words, other than failure and derision. But I know I can write, I have a book coming out, a team of professionals supporting and promoting me. I have recorded a podcast; interviews are scheduled, and I will be in a recording studio next week to read for the audiobook. These are not the actions of a chronically anxious, incapable pariah; they speak of success and a certain boldness and defiance. And this is perhaps the crux of the matter. I do not like the idea that those who do not really know me, see only the outer me, the surviving thriving me, and no more than that. I cannot bear to be both seen and simultaneously unseen, and misunderstood as a consequence. Though on the other hand why on earth would I want total strangers to be party to my private inner world? I do not owe everyone an explanation, but I behave as if I do. Perhaps I should have asked myself this question before writing a memoir.

Examining and learning to tolerate an array of contradictions in the way I see myself are key to my survival. Because these two extremes of myself do exist simultaneously: the bad mother who didn’t call her daughter in the days before her death, the good mother who drove up and down the motorway at the slightest sign of trouble; the weak mother who couldn’t get her child seen by a doctor, the persistent mother who asked and asked and asked for help;  the subdued and broken mother who can never forgive herself that her child died, the righteous and indignant mother who will never forgive politicians, the media and the NHS for creating an environment so hostile to trans existence.

I believe Alice must have lived, as I do, with a constant internal battle as to her worth and value. Her friends and family all loved and supported her (if not, in my case, entirely wholeheartedly at first). Society on the other hand, in its denial of access to education, healthcare and changing rooms, in its newspaper headlines of cheating at sports and predation in public toilets, told her she was an aberration. How is a teenage brain supposed to assimilate that information and grow strong and resilient rather than afraid and hopeless? But Alice tried, she really did. She made plans, had things booked to look forward to in her future, a new tattoo, a visit from a friend. But these were not enough, she needed systemic root change.

I am minded of our Christmas tree, still lying discarded on our drive awaiting a trip to the dump. It is almost completely denuded of needles. But if you look closely, the ends of many branches display bright green new growth. Even as the tree was dying, cut from its roots and pinned in a stand, it did all it could to carry on living. It was hopeful, it tried and tried, but it was doomed to failure. There was nothing it could do to change its destiny.

Alice, of course, was not a tree, her roots were not entirely severed, and at times she flourished and grew, but for a few days in May 2022 she felt as if they were. Without the nourishment she needed, nourishment of respect and dignity, acceptance and compassion, no number of green shoots, shoots she repeatedly and persistently sent out, could tether her to this world and she made her agonizing choice.

In 2025, with the UK at the frontline of a transphobic crusade, it is hard to keep on with resolutions to go to the gym, drink less, and write more. But these are my green shoots. If in these little ways I can strengthen my roots, ground myself and find some security, then maybe I will grow. For I feel impossibly small, and to fight my battles, for Alice and the trans community, I need to be a giant.