Most of us are more similar to each other in our pain than we realise.

Photo: Medusa (La Meduse), Salvador Dali, 1963

Even now, I have that familiar feeling, of apologising profusely for what is a simple mistake, the fear of having disappointed or worse, angered my parents. It is in the heartbeat that ratchets up, in the little tremble in my fingers, in the obsessive checking of my messages to see if I have been forgiven.

I catch more of these signs now - the little tics my body uses to signal that my parasympathetic nervous system is off-kilter. Something happening firmly in the present, to 34-year-old me, is sending me hurtling back to a younger self - a child knotted with shame, guilt, fear, and worry. A self whose armour was confidence, whose armadillo skin of cruel spines concealed a quivering, pale softness inside.

Learning to work with this softness has become a life goal for me as an adult. To coax the softness out gently into the world, to let it see light, to let it stretch its spindly legs and and take baby steps, like a little tender fawn. To tell it, I see you, I acknowledge you, you are a part of me and I know you were kept away because that was the only way my little girl-child-self knew how to survive.

The other day, V asked me to draw my grief.