The Homecoming

You've been made to feel like you were broken.

That's the part nobody says out loud. Not just that it ended, but the way it was done, and what it did to the part of you that knew.

This isn't a book about becoming someone new. You don't need to be rebuilt. You were never broken. You just stopped choosing her for a while, and this is the way back.

I learnt to snowboard at 42, in Japan, shortly after my long relationship ended. I didn't go looking for healing. I went because I needed to be somewhere that didn't know any of my story. What I found on that mountain is what this book is made of. The falling, the getting up, the closure that never came, the day I finally let go on the wind, and the moment I sat in the snow and understood that I had come home to myself.

The Homecoming is narrative nonfiction. It uses snowboarding, the sport that gave me my body back, as the way through. It doesn't sit above you telling you what to do. It sits beside you, in the slush, and tells you the truth.

I'm not a therapist and I'm not trying to be one. I didn't write this from the other side of healing. I wrote it while I was still in it.

If you're at the bottom of the run right now, wondering how you got here, this was written for you.

Come sit beside me.