When people believe in you, you start believing in yourself.

I grew up not being believed in — my skills and abilities and also my innate wisdom were overlooked; considered odd — and I consequently learnt from a very young age to abandon myself to fit in and be fed.

I am not a victim to this because I also know the wound is the gift.

So my life’s calling, and my ultimate answering to it, has been to value people and help them heal enough to believe in themselves again.

I have found in life that there are two times where people get abandoned in the type of society we now live in where attention spans are diminished and judgement trumps trust: when at our absolute rock bottom having lost the ability to don the masks of an expected norm, and when in our blissful joy living in alignment with our purpose and meaning.

There are always those champions in life who hold you in support and believe in you at both ends of the spectrum — these are your people; hold onto them … the ones who only hang out in the middle zones only erode the belief in yourself you have worked so hard at regaining.

The loneliest of people aren’t those who have no one around, they are the ones surrounded by people who don’t share values and who expect you to show up in service of who they need you to be.

As Michael Mead says, “The calling keeps calling.”

It is never too late and you are never too old to become who you were born to be. Depression, addiction, anxiety, stress … to name only a few afflictions of this world we live in … are the silent killers that need to be witnessed and brought into the light by those willing to go into the dark.

I have found that when life is so hard I have lost the capacity to help myself, I go buy a meal or a blanket for a homeless person or pay for street people to spend a night in a shelter. This is my medicine—an unwitting and relatively minor altruism and the one that has had the power to keep me going until I believe in myself again.

And then I must dance … because dark and light have to be navigated in equal measure for the psyche to find true harmony.