How do we not turn into our parents? I strove for years not to behave like mine. Yet the gene pull is strong, and I’m seeing them in the mirror. Seeing the fragility and humanity in their ageing softens our conflicts at last and in the end, acceptance.

Recognising blind spots is hard without gentle or not-so-gentle friends pushed to their limits of tolerance. What sounds like harsh criticism can become a guide. Decades ago, a friend said to me, “You’re like a stuck record” about the boyfriend I was complaining about at the time. It felt hurtful. Hard to hear yet necessary, as she was right and it was boring, critical and disloyal of me.

We’re unreliable with ourselves around exes. Yet admitting to appreciating or longing for the familiar, without the expectation of future entanglement, can be a friendly reminder of what remains good.

I’ve joined a Tibetan Buddhist dharma class, and last week we were looking at some guides for life. My favourite slogan was ‘Don’t load the ox with the cow’s burden’.

If nothing matters and there’s no free will, how do I not care what happens to me? I don’t know whether that’s depressing or ultimately liberating. Yet every day, there are decisions to make, forks in paths where I’m called to make a choice, some of which seem like they matter.

You don’t need to apologise for your preferences and needs being more important than mine. Good. I’m glad you have your own life, choices and plans. Yet if you really do think it’s unfortunate, maybe it's time to wriggle out of some of your obligations and follow what you’d love.

I love reusing and recycling. It’s a creative response ~ to not enough cash, and a wish to change the fallacy of needing new or matching. As I collect sticks for kindling, dry orange peels on the fire, or fill the compost, I ponder how to make something useful or beautiful out of what’s around. It’s a tiny effort amidst greenwashing, shifting the waste of late-stage capitalism to the individual instead of corporations. I know this, and I feel foolish sorting bottle tops. Yet consuming less and reusing more has its own satisfaction. Even if the scent of bitter orange peel reminds me of the futility of unrequited idealism, there’s still a warm sweetness.

HRT is like crack cocaine for menopause. I have no idea how my contemporaries who don't take it manage to get out of bed or achieve anything. A day without a patch has zero forward motion or optimism. I’m hooked, and the prospect of an oestrogenless future is fearful. It’s masking, making life doable enough and addictive enough that life without it might feel like falling off a cliff. I’m gratefully in love with my captor.

Don’t sit alone with your wondering or suffering. Find support, join a group, find a therapist, take a course. Calling a friend goes some of the way, but likely, they won’t have the time, patience or skill to know how to help you move on. Otherwise, you’re staring into a future of sameness, feelings intensifying, begging for your attention. Time alone isn’t a great enough healer. You can try to bury your desires and demons, but they’ll just come back in different places. New perspectives offer space, so we can stop believing everything we think.

Rather than cowardice, finding emotional courage to speak up requires not only the words to express ourselves, but the belief that what we want to say matters. That our expression won’t blow the show to pieces. Understanding the validity of our experiences matters. Rather than, and even when, feeling ashamed, indifferent, scared or wrong. Expressing vulnerability or dismay at others is difficult without heaping blame. Smaller unspoken words become straws to the explosive bomb of finality. I once heard ‘women can’t hear what men don’t say’, but I don’t sense it’s gendered. Keeping quiet is a safety mechanism, as saying ‘I don’t care enough’ or ‘I’ve had enough’ is hard to say, as we know it’s inexpressibly confronting to hear.

One of the most erotic experiences at TabooFest was a workshop on facial dominance. Controlling the sub by moving their face, and being controlled, was an exercise in seeing how far we could trust, take and let go with each other. Sensual erotic moments of putting my fingers in his mouth, the allowance of penetrating. Feeling his gloved fingers in my mouth, a longing to suck and swallow emerged. Lastly, the flimsy, spacious, clear plastic bags over the head, playing with each other's lives in our hands as we twisted or loosened the air supply. I’m not naturally submissive, but it’s the nearest I’ve felt to what I imagine teetering on the edge of subspace might offer. Trust is erotic.

Am I trustworthy, principled, courageous, competent, loyal, kind, understanding, forgiving, unselfish? I don’t remember where I read this list; maybe it was a list of how to be a good partner in relationships. While being dubiously principled, perhaps I don’t do too badly on the other qualities these days.

I feel rushed. In corporate life, I remember myself as a woman with car keys in her hands, always setting off slightly too late for wherever I was going, unintentional stress heaped on with careless timekeeping. It’s still like that. This summer, I want to sit on a sunbed with a compelling book for more than two mornings. Come and make me. Let’s have an iced coffee too and allow relaxation.

Ordinary unhappiness is nothing to eschew. Mustard seeds freely given to understand how this unites humans in suffering. Let’s not forget unbearable beauty as recompense.

Synthesis excites me, mixing ideas and possibilities across modalities. Although that runs the risk of being a jack of all trades and mistress of none, I’ll trade that rather than copying what’s always been done. For the discovery of something different, combining enthusiasms and collaborating with others feels better than staying stuck in a silo of uniformity.

Change happens by adopting new beliefs and altering behaviours in trust of different outcomes.

Admitting what I’m rubbish at is quite freeing and honest. Attention to detail, commitment and completion are not my best skills. Nor is there the willingness to be with lengthy emotional processes. I’d have made a terrible counsellor. Now that you know that about me, you can tell me what you don’t like doing or aren’t good at . Let’s not burden each other with unrealistic expectations of qualities beyond our limits.

I still love the feeling of astonishment when things turn out better than I might have imagined, hoped or planned.

“Don’t trash your experience with your mind.” Another of my tantra teacher’s memorable phrases. Regrets after the fact, reassessing what we enjoyed, agreed to, or went along with, may take us nowhere. The deed is done, that ship sailed. If we enjoyed or benefited from the experience, where’s the value in trashing? It’s been hard not to do that after choices I made where my body liked what was happening, yet my onlooking head was shaking in disbelief, or my heart was elsewhere. Sigh. Sometimes we just don’t want yet another ‘lesson’. Courage, mon brave. Keeping shame at bay, owning our agency, perhaps the best we can do is try to be wiser next time.

Unlike some of my friends for whom every feeling is a depth probe, I’m too busy to give emotions much attention.. Often I have to be asked a question to sense into what I feel. Despite years of somatic work, while I’m better at noticing sensations in the body, feeling emotions has been a piecing together. I think my feelings. In the Non Violent Communication lists, I found names for the different degrees of doubt, anger, pain, disquiet, consternation, unsureness, and dismay. Giving names to feelings, and then trying to figure out if or where I feel them, is an undertaking. It usually comes back to my heart, a place I’m less familiar with. Finding fractures of sensitivity, with a vulnerability I don’t have the inner permission to speak.