Walking and cogitating: retreading the circles of dog world. I’ve been trying to compose this postcard and finding discomfort, not ease. There is a whole vista of vulnerability and exposure. Weirdly, some things are easier to expose than others.

A memory: I’m about four years old. I stand in the toilet doorway in the middle of the night. I’m covered in vomit and shit and see myself reflected in my mother’s gaze. She is repulsed.

I’m nearly sixty now, and have been blessed by many healing moments along the way. Nevertheless, I do believe that a piece of that tiny girl has been stuck in that doorway for most of my life: the doorway of shame.

I’ve just had a small (not small for me) economic crisis. The infrastructure of my little life started to unravel and I realized how tiny the space is, between a professional woman and a homeless one. I’ve been pulling and pushing an unforgiving bank loan around for years. The roots of it go all the way back to my psychotherapy training. It nearly did for me, dear reader, but for an extraordinary wave of kindness from friends.

My debt has been settled, my arrears paid and the small (not so small) matter of a bed I probably should have resisted last summer, but somehow can’t quite regret, all done and dusted. I don’t owe anybody anything. Well, except the debt of overwhelming gratitude. A debt, I think I can live with because it lifts me up rather than weighs me down.

And something else: this process of being seen in the forensic detail of my financial mess, some of it my own undoing, has built a bridge between humiliation and humility. The child in that doorway of shame has had a redemptive experience. Instead of being seen in her mess as disgusting, I was just loved and lovingly helped.

Notwithstanding the monetary gifts in the external world, giving me a new lung capacity that I didn’t even realise I’d lost, I have been gifted back a piece of my lost to myself, self.

That, even though money runs through this story, is priceless.

And, now I am actually writing this, it’s not so hard. Money has so much correlation to value, in this funny old world. And if I buy into that equation I become smaller. Diminished. I tell myself I don’t have any assets and can forget to see my brokenness, in the light comes in through the cracks, sort of way. I get caught up in a model that measures success and value, in relation to a particular kind of asset. The kind I don’t have many of.

Don’t get me wrong – I wouldn’t mind a few more. I aspire to shoring up the banks of my little life with a bit more work: some extra cakes and a couple more humans in my psychotherapy room. As I said, it is a very small fall between okay and not. But, most crucially, through this very personal fall into economic chaos, followed by unimagianed debt relief, I have remembered where my assets really are.

I am loved, seen and forgiven. I have discovered, that while depression is indeed my home address, home is located in The Field’s Of Kindness. I’m allowed to make a holy mess of things, and find ways to recover. Perfection takes a hostage of heart and humanity. We are human. We are messy. It is like this. Hallelujah.

I didn’t know what to call this postcard. And then I did.