The Making of “I See, Me”

Why write a book

The road to writing my book has been a long one. I have started a few times over the years, initially intending to write a novel based on my life. I never got very far and it remained a "would like to do" in the back of my mind.

 Following my sight loss in 2017, leaving my long legal career in 2019 and the end of 3 years’ therapy in January 2020, I just knew I was going to write a book. I had learned so much since 2017, so much I had zero idea about before I started but had been so helpful in my healing (and continues to be on this healing path I'm very much still on). The time felt right and there was a compulsion to do it that I hadn't felt before. I wanted to write down everything I had learned for me, to honour what I had been through and to somehow draw a line under it. I also thought it might help raise awareness for others because I figured if I hadn't known any of it then there are likely to be other people who don't know as well.

Getting help

I have told myself for years that I am not creative and I knew I needed some support with the book. I put it out into the universe that I wanted help and ta-dah, I found the amazing Sam Osbiston. She helped me see the power in my story and encouraged me to write my memoir rather than the self-help type book I had envisaged. She supported me all the way in her kind, firm and encouraging way and has been my birth partner in this 12-month long project of writing, rewriting, beta reading, formatting and cover designing. It has been a rollercoaster of emotions as I really felt into my childhood trauma and looked at it again from my perspective now as an adult. It has been quite a journey and to say to you "Here I am in the world, yes me, and look I've written this book, please read it" is such a massive leap but I am ready for it. Writing the book has helped me enormously and I have released the story into the world so it can help whoever else needs to read it. 

Vulnerability and Shame

Back in the summer of 2020 a friend noticed that I had written on my website that I always used to feel “less than” and she asked if I really wanted to be that vulnerable. It was at that moment that wanting to write a book turned into having to write a book. I needed other people to know that being vulnerable is ok. It is a fundamental part of healing from the things that make us feel “less than” in the first place.

More recently someone suggested that in the book I am “washing my dirty laundry in public”. Now that took a bit of recovery time and I admit I had a wobble. Is that all I was doing, telling my dirty secrets? It took a day or two but I realised that it’s the shame of those “dirty secrets” that make us keep them secret and lead to us feeling “less than”. I had to tell my story to set me free and in doing so I could show other people that owning their story and talking about what bothers them is the road to healing. Vulnerability opens our heart. Shame closes it down. I know which I prefer.

The cover

The picture of the bird is a photograph of a tattoo I have on the inside of my left wrist. I have wanted another tattoo for a while and I decided I would finally get another in my 50th year. For a while I thought I was going to have two stars on one of my feet but when I decided I was going to do it I quickly decided to have a bird in my favourite colours (blue, teal, turquoise, purple)  I had it done in January 2020, 4 weeks before my 51st birthday so just managed to get it in in my 50th year. It also happened to be 2 weeks before I finished therapy and the bird felt like a fitting tribute to the work I had done over the previous 3 years. It is a constant reminder to me to fly free.

The title

My book is called "I See, Me" for a number of reasons. The book starts and ends with the experience I had losing a lot of the sight in my right eye. Hence the "I See" bit. That's also why my hex specs feature regularly throughout the book. I found me, the real me, in therapy and the work I have continued to do largely features discovering who I am now that the veil of my childhood trauma has been lifted. So that's the "Me" bit. The eye on the book cover is quite a child-like drawing of an eye as a lot of the story is about my childhood (and how my childhood continued to play out way into my adulthood). Right in the middle of the eye is my tattoo, so I am seeing me. I love how it all came together when I had decided on the "I See, Me" title.

 The blurb on the back of my book says:

“In January 2017 when Philippa suddenly lost a lot of the sight in her right eye, what followed wasn’t just the medical process of recovering most of that sight but an unravelling of the previous 47 years of her life to revisit the things she had refused to see. The ensuing transformation has enabled Philippa to have a totally new vision of her present and future and a desire to share it with you in the hope that it can help you see things in a new light too.

This is Philippa’s journey from “less than” to “enough”, from fearful, in pain and angry to open, courageous and alive. “

There is so much more to this story and I will share it gradually over the next few months. If you want to read it all, go to Amazon where you can buy the paperback or kindle version. Book on Amazon

December 2021