In February 2025, I was lucky enough to welcome my second child, Magenta, into the world, long-awaited little sister to my beautiful big girl Amity. But I can’t believe I ever got there.

My eldest was born out of a loss. I suffered a miscarriage before her but she followed so closely behind that I sometimes wonder if they were twins. I was only 20 when I fell pregnant and at the time, I didn’t realise quite how young that was. My partner Tom and I had only been together for a year and we had to get a lot of grown-up stuff sorted at a time when we didn’t have much to our names, externally or internally. Our relationship was born from grief. And so was our first baby, Amity. My pregnancy felt like a prison sentence. I couldn’t cope with what my body was going through, the many physical symptoms, the fears that I would be a terrible mother and that I wasn’t ready. My mental health plummeted and I became constantly frightened of everything all of the time. But then I went through the horrific pain and trauma of childbirth. And I was reborn. From the moment I knew she existed, she has been everything to me. Being a mum is the privilege of a lifetime. I sometimes look back to the first year or so of her life with rose-tinted glasses. She was the sunshine after the storm, the greatest achievement I could possibly fathom. I remember watching over her in the car on the way home from the hospital where she was born when she was less than 24 hours old thinking “I can do anything now. Nothing could be harder than this” And for a while, I carried that strength with me.

But then 2020 happened. All of my anxiety, phobia, misery, and grief came flooding back and swallowed me whole. I dipped very quickly and honestly thought at the time that I was actually happy that I wouldn’t have to go outside when we were all locked down. But I was young and naive and had absolutely no clue of the damage that would be done over those years and how long it would take to fix it. In the thick of it, my partner had a breakdown too, revealing depths that his Scorpio Moon had kept hidden away for a long time. I didn’t think we could survive it. But we did.

Whilst Tom and I got back on course and our beautiful Amity thrived, I stayed poorly. I got to the point where I couldn’t leave the house because my anxiety was so extreme. I started having awful intrusive thoughts all the time, mainly focused around falling ill or being attacked in the house. Whenever I had the slightest of brushes with these themes, and even when I didn’t, I would spiral and spiral and spiral, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, and the weeks turned into months and years. I missed my daughter being a bridesmaid at my friend’s wedding. I missed her whole time at pre-school and a lot of her first year at primary school, having to rely on family to bring her the short distance to and from the house because I “couldn’t” leave the house.

It felt like I couldn’t. But I could. And what it took was the right approach and that approach was built by me for me.

I realised that everybody is different and that true healing and subsequent progress and success does not come in the same processed package for everyone. I realised that life was about trial and error, cause and effect. But over this time indoors, even at my very worst, there were two things I could still do: care for my little girl and study. And astrology was the analytical tool I discovered through my various studies to assess what was happening with me and why I was different to other people and, most importantly, what I could do to fix it.

“I am an Aries, so I’m being a bad Aries right now because I should be being a bold and brave pioneering leader!” I would think to myself. I would also think that astrology must therefore be a load of rubbish because it’s not true. But then, I discovered real astrology. Real astrology, traditional natal astrology, showed me that I am indeed an Aries, but an Aries ruled by a nervous, overthinking, overorganising, reclusive and isolated Virgo 12th house Mars. Suddenly, I had an answer. And the rest of the chart gave me many more. I realised that my Mars was also very efficient and exceptionally good at problem-solving, especially when it came to tapping into how to fix my own mental health issues. I built my own path out.

I manage things now that I never ever thought I would be capable of. My second pregnancy was even worse than the first in reality. I became very poorly with severe anaemia and ended up in a dangerous situation where I had to have an emergency c-section to bring little Maggie into the world. It wasn’t the natural birth that I had with my eldest and the pregnancy didn’t happen successfully. But I managed better than I ever could have done the first time. I felt happy. I spent time out with my family, despite my symptoms. I watched my daughter’s school show, tears of happiness on top of the morning sickness. I got my daughter to and from school by myself without fear, even as I began to struggle with legitimate physical symptoms that almost killed me. But I did it, and what’s more, I did it happy. I never take a single thing for granted these days. I walk down the street and see a blackbird perched on a branch or a weed growing through the cracks in the pavement and I feel like I’ve been blessed with more luck and joy than anybody in the whole world. I look at my daughters and I am overwhelmed with pride and gratitude. What do I do to deserve them? How could I be so lucky? The truth is that I wouldn’t have ever got to this point if I didn’t know how it feels to live life in survival mode, wondering if each day will be your last. The underworld was always there for me before. I became so psychotic at times that I would hallucinate. Shadow figures would poke their heads around corners and walk past doorways and I couldn’t stop them, because they were a part of me. What I lived in my head was like a horror film. It was a hellscape. People feel sorry for me because of all that but I feel sorry for them. Because they will moan about the traffic or the weather or the queue length in the shop. But I’m grateful for all of it. The underworld came for me, I mastered it, and I came back stronger than anybody I know.

The thing that makes me the happiest is being a mum. I’m so desperately happy that I can be there for my children wherever they are now, not just at home. I’m proud that I was always there for my eldest daughter through my illness, but I was always there in one isolated place and I missed so much. But the only way to deal with this stuff is to accept it. The longer you lie to yourself or make excuses as to why it wasn’t your fault, the longer you remain in that murky stuck 12th house place. We must take responsibility for everything that happens in our lives, whether we are the total cause, the partial cause, or the cause by circumstance. It is ours to carry, not something to palm off on somebody else. I would sit and think “Why won’t anybody help me?” but what I needed to do was think “How can I help myself?” And the answer was to give myself some tough love and make myself do it by organising a gradual system of exposure to everything that terrified me.

But that was my answer. I know that everybody’s answer is different. So many struggle because they feel that they are impossible, but what they need is bespoke treatment. And that’s where I come in.