My six-year-old sometimes says to me, “Mummy I love you very much, but I love myself more because you’ve got to love yourself before you can love others.”

Loving yourself is important of course, and yet so many of us – women in particular – beat ourselves up for not being good enough, not successful enough, not slim enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough and so on. I do this too. Continue reading →

Sports were never my strong suit. At school I was always one of the last to be chosen when teaming up for competitive games. I was terrified of being hit in the face by the football and I never managed to shoot the ball straight. My batting skills, in turn, were appalling.

In my late teens, I briefly took up badminton with my cousin and though we had a lot of fun, neither of us showed much promise as players. Continue reading →

A year ago I wrote a blog post on perfectionism, smugly claiming that I had freed myself from its tyrannical hold. Well, I spoke too soon.

While it is true I no longer feel the need to strive towards perfection in life the way I used to, perfectionism still comes sneaking up on me at times. Continue reading →

As always, I approach my summer holidays with the intention of reading lots of good books, and as always I end up reading a pile of easily digested – and easily forgotten – crime novels.

This summer would have been no different if I hadn’t come across a book that’s neither easy to digest nor easy to forget. And it isn’t a crime novel.

Facing Up To It is a deeply moving yet unsentimental memoir by Dawn Shaw, who was born with a fist-sized tumour protruding from her neck, the removal of which meant she lost half of her chin and rendered the left half of her face paralysed. Continue reading →