Billboards from the universe

How faith works for me right now

I need to tell you about the most beautiful gift I received yesterday, from my closest friend Mia, at the hospital. Mia had very kindly come to be with me for my first chemo dose, which was a scary and uncertain experience ahead of time. So many potential side effects, so many uncertainties, apart from that nothing would ever be quite the same again.

While we were in reception waiting to go in, Mia gave me a few presents to help make the experience more bearable. Some cute socks, a notebook, and a little leather pouch with two creatures in it. One, a silly rubber duck to make me laugh. The other, a small stone statue of a warrioress riding a dragon and holding a crystal ball. The significance of the dragon is huge and told me I was being looked after and that all was going to be ok.

It was a billboard from the universe, a sign that was so huge it couldn’t be missed.

How I knew this, I will try to explain. Brevity is not going to be my forte because I am up to my eyeballs on slightly woozy making antisickness meds (thankfully working).

One of the key states of mind, practices and attitudes that has kept me going in many a dark time, and that I’ve really leaned into these past few months, has been faith.

What is faith to me? It’s a deep knowing that I am being looked after by something, a loving force for good that wants the best for me. It is about trust, about holding onto the hope that there is some sort of plan in place, even if I don’t understand what it is, that means everything will work out ok. It means staying the course when I can’t sense what the ultimate outcome will be and whether I’ll even like it when it arrives, and basically just keeping going. Sometimes the keeping going is in leaps and bounds, sometimes it’s in tiny actions.

Faith in a higher power and surrendering to a loving, caring force that wanted the best for me, was something that I learnt first in 2002 when I started my addiction recovery journey and embraced the 12 steps. The core premise is that you need to find and tap into a power greater than you to keep you clean and sober, to change your behaviour and to keep you in service to the greater good rather than in active addiction and selfishness. Initially I would pray to and engage with a committee of dead people – grandparents, a cousin, an old friend who had succumbed to illnesses contracted during the contaminated blood scandal. Over the years, my higher power became something broader, more like nature, the beauty of the universe, a loving force for good, and the magic of intuition, all wrapped up in one.

My faith has been fairly solid over the years, but I had a serious crisis in mid 2023 into 2024 following a very serious car accident. Another driver did something very dangerous and overtook coming towards me on a fast-moving A-road on a blind corner, and I happened to be driving on the other side of the road at the wrong moment. The police told me not long afterwards they hadn’t expected anyone to survive, god bless airbags and seatbelts…

The injuries I sustained included a traumatic brain injury, which means constant brain pain, cognitive impairments and limits, dizziness, exhaustion, light and sound sensitivity, then there’s the neck and shoulder issues, and PTSD. My whole life and what I was capable of changed in a split second. It has taken extensive rehab and support to find a way of operating, to work within the brain injury limits and not overdo it, and to manage the pain and anxiety. My work was taking off big time when it happened, and everything had to come to a crashing halt while I rested and rehabbed.

I found it impossible to believe that what had happened was part of a loving and marvelous plan on the part of the universe. ‘If this is being looked after, you can fuck off’ was basically how I felt. Not long after, I realised that to get through this hellish brain injury landscape, one where there was no promise or guarantee of significant recovery, I would need to re-find my faith. I didn’t feel like praying because I was too pissed off with God. ‘Just’ to be alive felt like too low a bar for being genuinely loved and looked after. There were times when the symptoms and life alteration of it all was too much and I felt like I was drowning into a blackness but had to keep going not least for my wonderful children – I’m a solo parent to two wonderful teenage boys. And also, for my mission and purpose in life, to end misogyny and make the world a better place for women and girls.

Knowing that if I could find faith again, it would help enormously and make the biggest difference to being able to keep going no matter how bad symptoms were, I went back to spiritual basics. I started forcing myself to pray, mostly just to open the channels of communication again, mostly to tell whatever was listening that I wasn’t feeling looked after and to ask for help in reconnecting. ‘Show me that you’re here and looking after me’.

Various spiritual explorations ensued as I sought to re-find my high power and my faith in it. One of the simplest practices that had worked many times before that I leaned into, was to ask for signs, not just little ones but great big whopping billboards so obvious that I couldn’t miss them. They started to appear – an old friend would come to mind briefly, for no apparent reason, and then they’d randomly message me. I would be followed by a robin on a dog walk, or spot white feathers, other things that I’d come to know were signs over the years. I’d have an intuitive thought about something, and the someone else would confirm it later. That sort of thing.

Finding my soulmate in late 2023 was also big sign of being looked after, and the unfolding of our relationship into our pink cloudy, delicious, funny, lovely, beautiful, deeply connected love helped a lot too.

Little did I know that a monumental new test of faith was on its way, by way of a breast cancer recurrence. As soon as I got the call a few days after my original scans in January to come back in for a biopsy, I just knew deep down that it was back. The first time in 2018 was 18 months after a traumatic car accident, and this time was also 18 months after a car accident, albeit much more serious this time. Something about the deep trauma and inflammation, or just a coincidence, who knows.

Anyway, since the diagnosis, faith has carried me through, almost always by asking for signs and getting them. Spotting them is just as important as getting them, and this requires presence and really noticing.

On Tuesday, the last day pre chemo, I was taking my sweet cockerpoo Fizzy to the groomers. Next door there is a reclamation yard with outdoor statues, and I asked whether they had any elephants. One day I’ll tell you about elephants. They didn’t have any, but I noticed they had lots of dragons, which I also love and feel strangely drawn to. I was born in the year of the dragon and love their mystical qualities and symbolism; fierce, powerful, magical, beautiful, strong, warding off evil and protecting what is good. None of their dragons were quite right, mostly too scary, so I left holding the thought that I needed to find the right stone dragon.

After I picked Fizzy up, I was feeling wobbly about chemo starting, and decided to ask for signs on the way to the park where we were going to walk. ‘Show me I’m being looked after and that everything is going to be ok’, was basically my request to the universe.

And then the next morning, I was gifted the perfect stone dragon, right before chemo, from my closest friend. Talk about a billboard that can’t be missed. I asked for signs, and I got the biggest one yet.

Getting through life’s challenges is hard, and I believe it is easier for me when I have my faith in place. Dragons, feathers, robins, intuitive flashes, it all counts.

What gives you faith?

Have you tried asking for signs? Maybe you should.

I hope we all get our stone dragon moment when we most need it, that reassurance that everything is going to be ok.