Finally accepting who I am at nearly 37
Coming home to the little girl who felt more at home with the creatures than the humans
Most kids tend to have imaginary friends. I had imaginary animals. Three of them; a bird, a horse and a dog. If I could, I would always choose to spend time with animals over humans. I worked at the local stables in exchange for spending time with horses. I wasn’t even that interested in riding them, I just wanted to be close to them and get to know them. I had the usual kid pets, goldfish, hamsters, guinea pigs. When they died I grieved for them for days, I took days off school. It was akin to losing a friend.
When my grandad died we took on his border collie for a while. My mum was allergic to dogs so it had to live outside. So I moved outside. I lived with the dog all day and all night until it was bedtime. I just sat with him, groomed him, laid with him.
After my mum left at 15 I started spending more and time time with a family who would become my unofficial foster family and at 16 I moved countries to live with them full-time. I soon transitioned into my own bedsit and immediately it became a kind of menagerie for my own personal emotional sustenance. Two rats became eleven (one was unbeknownst to me pregnant), two ferrets, a snake. I had one room and precious little space to exist but these pets were essential. I didn’t realise it then as I do now but I needed these animals to keep me going. They needed me. I had to get up every day to feed, water, clean, handle, walk and get outside of my own head.
At 19 I became pet free for the first time in my life. I had moved to London and as much as I loved walking my ferret (Bungle had died of cancer shortly before moving) along the Camden canals, it wasn’t a life for him. So I rehomed Zippy to a beautiful place where they had a stream and a harem of jills (female ferrets) for him to spend time with. The rats had died and the snake had gone with my ex to the flat next door (fun fact, I ended up learning about Jim the snake’s demise through Noel Fielding’s Instagram page 🤣).
At 19 I also had the first and one of the most profound mental health crises of my life so far. I became anorexic and I slipped into alcoholism. I completely stopped being able to take care of myself and became nihilistic and lost. This went on for four years.
In moments of euphoric recall I can remember having some amazing experiences during that time. I got to tour the world as the bassist of a punk band, I went to some absolutely phenomenal free parties and raves, I deeply bonded to some amazing humans but I was in deep pain and I was self-medicating with starvation, sex and booze.
Somewhere towards the end of that four year period the self-medicating stopped working. I became so paranoid and anxious that I couldn’t leave the bedroom of the house I shared with an-ever fluctuating number of friends (sometimes five sometimes eight). Every attended excursion ended up with me hiding in a public toilet sweating and panicking and totally trapped until the feeling subsided.
I didn’t know it at the time but I was deeply, deeply traumatised and having lost connection to the animals and nature that had provided so much healing and support, I fell apart.
I got sober, I found yoga, I met my now husband of thirteen years but I was still in a huge amount of pain. I found some different coping strategies; busyness, exercise, caffeine.
This went on for another few years. We toured in our folk duo, we both became self-employed and then we moved into a caravan in the countryside.
The small child who had grown in rural environments all around the world connecting to animals had found her way home. And I collapsed. The safety allowed me to feel all I had been repressing and suppressing. This time it took the form of a chronic illness. It took three years to recover from this bout of chronic pain and exhaustion. I found some new coping strategies; meditation, quiet time in nature, cyclical living, deeply fulfilling work with women around their cycles and lots of time and space to rest.
Then I got pregnant, had my daughter and experienced the intense and, in my case, destabilising transition of matrescence. All of my coping strategies were taken away. Every single one. I was forced to sit with everything, exhausted in total presence as I tried to be present to my baby daughter. I broke in two.
I wouldn’t change a thing.
It was the most painful, excruciatingly painful thing I have ever experienced in my life but it led me back home. It offered me the space to feel it all. And it opened me up to an opportunity I may not have been offered had I not been open to making a significant change.
Mere months into my recovery from a profound maternal mental health crisis, I reconnected with animals. I started facilitating women’s yoga retreats at an alpaca farm half an hour from my house. I met these beguiling and beautiful, mysterious creatures and I fell in love. Fast forward a year and I’m taking care of these creatures for a living.
I am now two years into the best mental health of my life to date.
Sometimes I wonder if I am suppressing or avoiding. I spent a decade identifying with pain. The journey through that pain was essential. I needed to spend time there and sharing about it was a part of that process. But my desire to move beyond that, is it avoidance? Maybe. But also do I really need to question peace?
I spent a lifetime running and I know now that most of the time I can be still with my thoughts and not be afraid. I can feel a dysregulating emotion and not panic. I can be vulnerable, not just in words but in feelings. I am not ‘healed’. But I have found peace.
And as I sat contemplating all of this this morning I was called to writing. And as I wrote I somehow found myself writing about my connection to animals and I as I did so I unpicked a narrative I hadn’t yet connected.
19 was the first time I found myself without an animal by my side. I didn’t find myself with regular animal contact again until I was 36. Seventeen years without the support I most need.
When I have to show up for animals I have to show up for myself. I cannot collapse, I cannot give up. This means that I cannot surrender to my emotional collapse response in the face of feeling helpless and hopeless. I have to get up and take care of the creature(s) that needs me. And in turn I receive the connection, the calm, the peace and the healing I have always received from animals.
A wordless, non-judgemental holding. A safe experience of touch. A kindred spirit-ness of feeling flighty, anxious and vigilant. A love of quietly being together without expectations.
This week we welcomed a group of autistic children and children experiencing challenges with their mental health to the farm to spend time with the alpacas. It was a profoundly healing experience for me. The best few years of my schooling experience were those that I got to take my pets to school with me. The moment this was taken away I struggled but no one questions that anything’s up if you’re getting As (a whole topic for another time!). We see kids transform when they come and spend time with the alpacas. Kids who struggle in every other setting come alive with time amongst these peaceful creatures. And I see myself in these children. I am finally accepting who I am at nearly 37.
I was just talking to a friend yesterday about how I never for a moment had in my life plan to end up working with autistic children in a paddock of alpacas but here I am and it truly feels as though I’ve had little choice in the matter. I am so deeply in awe of what happens when we surrender to where we are being guided in our hearts.
I stepped outside this morning with the first line of this piece in my mind and had the feeling that I just had to write it and see what followed. An hour later with tears streaming from my eyes I feel I have processed something significant in showing up here and I am supremely grateful to you for being here if you’ve made it this far.
Carly x
This is so, so beautiful Carly. Making me reflect a lot of what’s going on in me too, and Ray. The experience that Ray had with the alpacas the first time we came was transformative for him too. He doesn’t quite have the language to describe but I could see it in him, in his body. The peace that happened, the way that he could just sit and be, and honestly that hadn’t happened for a very very long time, he’d been so unwell and broken and not himself, and in that moment there was just hope and I knew that he was there. So many more things to process and say but just 💜💜💜💜 LOVE.