Transcript
Where you’re standing, I’ve stood, and where you’re standing, I can’t now stand.
If I could, I’d be there too, somewhere in the bustling heart of Brighton. Maybe drinking coffee outside a cafe, or swapping books at the library while the whole town swirls about me, teeming with life. I might poke about the shops or meet up with a friend, make my way down to the Palace Pier to check if the sea is still there. Maybe even go for a dip. Nothing very dramatic.
I didn’t know it was all so precious and so fragile. That all the small, mundane pleasures and choices of our silly little lives matter so much, or that they’re ultimately a profound privilege and not a right. Of course, we all know we’re going to die, but if we’re young and healthy, that knowledge can feel pretty distant and theoretical, almost like it will happen to someone else. That someone we’ll someday be.
But the stark truth is that it isn’t just a binary split between full blooded living or death. There are many states in between, and this illness is one of them. And the brutal reality is that anyone can become ill or disabled at any time.
I still love my life, and there’s still much happiness and beauty and solidarity to be experienced and shared. But there’s also a lot of limitation and constriction that I never imagined would come to me in my thirties. I have good days and bad days, but it’s true that I’ve spent a lot of the last decade lying flat in the dark, unable to meaningfully engage with anything or anyone outside of my own mind. I deeply miss vitality, spontaneity, opportunity.
I’m glad you’re there today, though I can’t be. I hope today is a good day for you. And if it’s not, if it’s a tricky day, I hope that you can find some bright spots, some solidarity, beauty, love and know that I’m sending that from where I am now, that I’m wishing you well and wishing you happy. Grab all that your life offers because it’s a time limited deal.
I’d like to leave you with part of a poem by Mary Oliver. It goes like this.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Postcards
Send Cate a Postcard
For so many people the experience of being house and bed-bound means you are cut off and isolated from the rest of the world. If this message has resonated with you, you’re invited to respond with a postcard.
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Visit
The Mirrorbox will be visiting Jubilee Square, Brighton to share Cate's message on 17 October 2026.
