the parts of ourselves we keep putting aside

I’ve been writing a book in spurts. When I began, I knew it wouldn’t be an overnight project. I expected it to take several weeks, perhaps a few months (though I preferred the idea of the former, if I’m honest). I started enthusiastically, knuckling down and writing whenever I could, carrying the sense that I was finally giving proper space to something that had been waiting for me.

Then other things began to appear.

They were newer, more immediate and, like a magpie, I found myself distracted by these shinier objects. The book continued to matter, although after weeks of working on it, it had become familiar in the way longer projects often do. It was no longer something I was beginning. It was something I was returning to, setting aside, returning to again, then moving away from when another part of life demanded my attention.

Over recent months, much of that attention has gone into changing the direction of my work. I’ve been moving towards supporting women living abroad, drawing on more than twenty years of my own experience, and the shift has asked a great deal of me. There has been old work to review, new work to consider and questions about how everything I’ve done up until now sits alongside the work I want to do next.

Most recently, I became immersed in reviewing old oracle card reading pages after discovering that some of them still carried significant authority in Google. Pages written years ago appeared to have more visibility than newer work and could be affecting whether the direction I was now moving towards was being found at all. It felt important enough to stop for.

Visibility affects whether the work reaches anyone, and when a new direction already carries uncertainty, it’s difficult to ignore something that may be quietly holding it back. I began looking through those older pages, thinking about what needed to change and what might happen if I left them as they were.

The book waited again. By then, the manuscript was fully written. The foreword was complete. The afterword was complete. It had been edited. Only the final read-through remained.

There was nothing substantial left to create, no unwritten chapter waiting for me, no gap in the manuscript I still needed to understand. I only needed to sit down, read it from beginning to end and take it towards publication. Yet every time I came close to doing that, something else moved in front of it.

Some of those things were genuinely important. Others were simply easier to begin because they belonged to the present moment and carried the energy of something new. The manuscript had been with me for months. I knew it well enough for it to feel almost ordinary, even though completing it still mattered.

I hadn’t abandoned it, though. That distinction began to feel important. Abandoning something suggests a decision has been made, even when that decision is painful. Repeatedly putting something aside is less clear. The intention remains. You continue telling yourself you’ll come back to it when this piece of work is finished, when that situation has settled, when you have a little more time or enough room in your mind to give it proper attention. The project stays close enough to remain part of your life, while never moving far enough forward to become complete.

Life abroad creates plenty of places for that to happen. The years have been shaped by moves, new systems, different countries, changing work and the practical need to adapt again and again. Each time life shifts, attention moves towards what is most immediate. There are registrations, decisions, illnesses, family concerns, work changes and all the ordinary demands of trying to keep a life functioning when familiar structures are no longer around you.

The things that belong only to you can become surprisingly easy to postpone because they aren’t always urgent in the way everything else appears to be. They don’t send reminders. Nobody’s waiting at a counter for the correct paperwork. Nothing stops working when you leave them untouched for another week. They simply remain where you left them.

The manuscript remained.

As I moved further into the work I wanted to do with women living abroad, another idea began floating around in my mind. I started thinking about writing a book drawn from my own experience of more than twenty years abroad, a book that could hold the reality of this life in all the ways it is rarely understood from the outside.

I know the positive sides of this life as well as the negative sides. I know how friends and family sometimes perceive it and how living abroad actually feels from being within it. I know what it is to experience ordinary life events across countries, where even familiar things could become harder to navigate because the surrounding structures are unfamiliar or the people you most need are somewhere else.

The idea of that future book carried energy. It belonged to the direction I was moving in now. It felt connected to the women I wanted to support and to the work I wanted to become known for. I could imagine beginning it far more easily than I could imagine sitting down to read a manuscript I had already lived with for months.

I also knew I would not allow myself to start it. I had made that commitment quietly. The new book wouldn’t begin before the current one was fully complete.

At first, that felt like a practical boundary between one project and another, a way of preventing myself from scattering my attention even further. Yet the longer the unfinished manuscript remained beside the idea of the new one, the harder it became to see them as separate. One belonged to the chapter I was moving towards. The other still belonged to me too.

The book had been written through months in which life had continued changing around it. I hadn’t lost interest in what it contained. Nor had I decided that it no longer mattered. It had simply been interrupted often enough for the interruptions to become normal.

There are parts of ourselves that can begin to feel like that after years abroad. They’re not always gone. Sometimes they’ve simply been waiting beneath layers of necessary adjustment, set aside each time something more immediate moved to the front. A project, an ambition, a way of working, a creative part of life or something subtly meaningful can remain present for years without being given enough uninterrupted space to move. Sometimes it's also the sense of belonging we imagined we'd eventually find, only to discover it doesn't arrive in quite the way we expected.

From the outside, it may not look as though anything has been lost. Life continues. Work is done. Moves are managed. Responsibilities are met. New possibilities appear. Yet somewhere among all that adaptation, certain parts of a woman’s own life can remain permanently next in line.

This sometimes enters the conversations I have through Personal Support. A woman may not arrive saying she has lost herself. More often, she begins with something smaller and more specific, something she keeps thinking about or something she has promised herself she’ll return to once life settles. Sometimes it is a conversation she continues replaying because it has left her questioning whether she can trust her own judgement. As we remain with it, the years around that postponement gradually come into view, along with the part of her that has continued waiting.

My manuscript didn’t need another reinvention. It didn’t need a new plan or a fresh beginning. It just needed me to return to what was already there and stay with it long enough to finish. That was more difficult to romanticise than the idea of starting a new book. I was never stepping into a completely different version of myself. I was simply going back to the pages I’d already written and taking responsibility for bringing them to their natural end.

I could still feel the pull of everything surrounding the new direction of my work. The old pages still needed attention. Visibility still mattered. The future book remained compelling because it belonged so clearly to where I was heading. However, I had reached the point where I could no longer keep moving towards that future while leaving something meaningful almost finished behind me.

For years abroad, I’d become accustomed to letting life rearrange the order of things. Often it had been necessary. Sometimes there’d been no real choice. This time there was. The final read-through was still waiting, the manuscript complete except for my willingness to place it in front of everything else for a little while. I had spent months telling myself I’d come back to it. Eventually, coming back had to mean more than continuing to remember that it was there.