Before I got ill, my family and I would usually visit the Lake District a few times a year and it became a home from home for us.
There were a lot of comforting rituals that I found so joyful about these trips – from going on particular walks or getting coffee from our favourite cafe, having fish and chips as soon as we arrived or doing our favourite mountain hike.
But the most special one to me was always going to visit the Castlerigg Stone Circle. No matter how many times I had been up there and seen that view, it just always seemed to shift and change and become even more beautiful with every visit.
And every direction that you look in offers this new incredible and quite overwhelming landscape. It just feels very ancient and there’s this energy surrounding it that’s really hard to put into words but it’s absolutely one of my favourite places.
And when you become unwell with a chronic illness, you become so isolated from the world and from people and from those places that you loved. And it often seems as though your identity is slipping away because it feels like the things that made you, you are no longer accessible.
And this paired with the stigma of having an illness that is very easily dismissed as laziness or just being tired becomes frustrating because we would give anything to be back in our favourite places.
And for me it feels impossible to accept the reality that I can’t be there. But I know that these memories and the hope of visiting these places that we love again is definitely a reason to keep going.
