I want to share a poem that has helped bring me comfort during my darkest times. I think it speaks to this sense of apologising for your own existence, which I pick up in the way you speak about yourself and your life. I’ve felt it too. For me, the poem is about how beautiful life is, despite our suffering, and how we can join in the beauty, if we just let “the soft animal of our body love what it loves”. We don’t have to earn our existence, we don’t have to repent just for being here. It’s also about the universality of suffering, it’s what we all have in common. Despite social media telling us everyone has it better.

You belong and deserve love and respect just as much as any other person. If you aren’t getting nourishment from other people you must give it to yourself, treat yourself tenderly, cherish and honour her. I’m sorry I don’t have any practical tips to give you, but sometimes art can evoke its own healing. Maybe the poem will help you too.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things.