I’ve had a cold these last few days.

Nothing dramatic – just enough to flatten me a bit. Tired. Headachy. Fuzzy. The sort of low-grade unwellness that blurs the edges of everything else.

And because of that, I didn’t notice at first.

Today I felt better. The fog lifted. My energy came back a notch. I could think again – or so I thought. The headache hadn’t quite gone. Concentration was still slippery. My legs kept juddering, that odd internal vibration that feels like anxiety trying to escape through my knees.

Then I clocked the rest of it.

The faint whistling in my ears – the sound that so often comes before migraines and panic. The shallow breathing I associate with tension. The tight band across my chest that says something is wrong even when I couldn’t name it.

And of course something is wrong.

Six years ago, at this time of year, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room with my dad and my brother, waiting for my mum to die.

My husband was at home with the dog.

Just writing that still hurts like fuck.

Not remembering her death.

Waiting for it.

That suspended time. That awful vigilance. The moment when your whole nervous system learns a new lesson about winter, hospitals, family, and loss – and never quite unlearns it.

That memory doesn’t exist on its own. It sits alongside years of Christmases that were already fragile.

The ones postponed because my husband’s mental illness meant we had to wait until he was “better”. The Christmas when his episode detonated so badly that he ended up in a psychiatric ward for nearly three months. The Christmas where I myself had a complete meltdown – not out of nowhere, but because everything was already stretched past breaking.

But the worst Christmas by far was the one in that hospital.

So no – this sadness hasn’t come out of nowhere. It’s been trundling along for years, gathering speed, rattling the tracks. A train crash of emotion that never actually crashed, never stopped, never got dealt with. It just kept going, because it had to.

There was always someone else to hold together.

Something more urgent.

Another crisis that mattered more than my grief.

This year feels different.

Not easier – god, no – but different.

For the first time in a long while, I don’t feel like I have to keep everything upright for everyone else. I’m not bracing myself to manage someone else’s collapse. I’m not postponing my feelings until a more convenient moment.

There’s room.

And because there’s room, the grief is loud.

The sadness this year is intense. Physical. It lives in my chest and legs and breath, not just in my thoughts. It isn’t asking to be analysed or fixed. It just wants space. Air. Time.

Maybe that’s how healing actually comes in.

Not as relief.

Not as closure.

But as permission.

Permission for the body to remember what the mind couldn’t afford to feel at the time. Permission for grief to finally stretch out instead of being folded away. Permission to stop pretending that survival was the same thing as processing.

This doesn’t feel noble or strong. It feels messy and inconvenient and poorly timed.

But it feels honest.

And maybe that’s enough for now.